BILD podcasts with personalized AI voice now available in English

From now on, selected BILD podcasts will also be available in English, thanks to a new collaboration between BILD and ElevenLabs. This partnership allows BILD to expand its primarily German-language audio offerings to include more languages, using both ElevenLabs’ AI and Axel Springer’s in-house developed audio AI, aravoices.

Among the first English-language offerings generated for BILD using ElevenLabs are the current episodes of the successful podcast series RONZHEIMER. and FC BAYERN INSIDER, which are of particular interest to an international audience. The episodes which use synthetic voices are transparently labeled as AI-generated and appear on the podcast portals in a separate playlist dedicated for the formats, like on BILD.de, Amazon Music, Apple Podcast, Spotify and everywhere where podcasts are available.

Listen to the German & English renditions of the shows below:

Ronzheimer [English]

Ronzheimer [German]

Bayern Insider [English]

Bayern Insider [German]

Claudius Senst, CEO BILD-Group, had this to say “At Axel Springer, we are actively exploring the possibilities and opportunities where and how we can strengthen journalism and expand our digital reach using artificial intelligence. At the end of 2023, for example, we launched Hey_ at BILD, an AI helper that has already answered over 45 million questions since then. Through the cooperation with ElevenLabs, we now want to test for BILD how we can make suitable audio content with a personalized voice even more attractive for an English-speaking audience.”

“We are delighted to be working with BILD, Germany’s largest media brand”, says Mati Staniszewski, co-founder at ElevenLabs. “BILD podcasts can now reach more people globally, bridging language barriers and improving accessibility. And because our AI preserves the original voices and style in translation, audiences worldwide can now experience podcasts such as Paul Ronzheimer’s in their own languages, delivered in their creators’ authentic style.

Axel Springer’s audio AI aravoices generates over 2 million audio streams per month for BILD and WELT

Starting in 2020, BILD and WELT already have specific synthetic brand voices that were created by Axel Springer’s proprietary audio AI aravoices. With the help of these brand voices and a fully automated distribution process, aravoices generates and publishes over 2 million audio streams per month for both brands. The aravoices offering not only boosts audio usage and increasing monetization through audio advertising, but also provides barrier-free access to journalistic content. BILD alone now publishes up to 40,000 audio articles per year, which are used for a variety of formats such as the read-aloud function on BILD.de, playlists on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well as Alexa News Update.

Anne Küpper, Director Product & Engineering at Axel Springer, added “With aravoices, we developed our own impressive AI technology at Axel Springer at an early stage, which we use to set journalistic articles from BILD and WELT to audio in real time and distribute them successfully. Many positive user comments show the popularity and success of the audio streams with our listeners. Thanks to the cooperation with ElevenLabs, we can now expand our brand voices with specific, lifelike author voices.”