A grant from ElevenLabs supported the creation of a location-based storytelling app

Before moving to London this year, I lived in the heart of Greenwich Village in Manhattan. One block west of my place was an unassuming yet swanky jazz club called the Blue Note. Over the years I popped into the Blue Note to catch some shows and enjoy a drink. 

While I knew the city was teeming with history, I never knew that my local jazz club could have so much cultural significance. That was until I took a tour of my old neighborhood with Storyrabbit. Storyrabbit creates custom audio tours - sharing personalized stories and history based on your location and interests. 

From Storyrabbit, I learned that the Blue Note is a regular stomping ground for celebrities, from Frank Sinatra to Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep. And in 2015, Ethan Hawke filmed “Born to Be Blue” there, a documentary about Jazz Trumpet legend Chet Baker. 

Building Storyrabbit

Kelly Garner had an accomplished career in television production and documentary filmmaking before founding Treefort in 2018. Treefort, his audio first storytelling studio, became known for producing Fatal Voyage, a true crime podcast, and scripted shows like Moriarty for Audible and Killer Psyche for Wondery. 

After spending a long holiday in Europe, he was looking for ways to better understand the historical context of the sites and felt something was missing from the plaques and a few less than stellar tour guides. This trip inspired him to build Storyrabbit - an app that serves as your personalized audio tour guide, tailoring the messaging based on your personal interests and surroundings. After listening to a 90 second long “rabbit hole”, you can ask your guide to go deeper or move on to another story.

Through an ElevenLabs Grant, Kelly’s company Treefort Media got 3 months free of our Text to Speech to develop his product. Together we developed multiple professional-grade voice clones for the project, giving listeners the ability to engage with multiple unique guides. Actor Dominic Monaghan has also contributed to Storyrabbit with the “Wild Guide”, creating nature-focused content. “Being able to work in real time with Hugo Rayne from ElevenLabs to perfect the voice clones was a game changer for us.”

Kelly and the team at Treefort along with their development partners at Younite.ai plans to expand the app with both scripted and unscripted formats, adding richer sound design and practical features like live data integration to make these stories feel more alive and personal for listeners. We’re excited to see where Storyrabbit goes.

Our ElevenLabs grant gave Treefort the tools to experiment with human-like voices in their app. With three months of free access and 11 million credits each month, Storyrabbit could test and launch at scale.

Supporting new ideas like Storyrabbit is what Grants is all about. Successful applicants get three months of free access to the ElevenLabs platform, with high-scale capacity, early access to new features, and over 200 hours of audio generation each month. If you have an idea you want to pursue with AI Audio, apply for a grant today. If you’re looking to better understand your world through personalized audio stories, download Storyrabbit or go to Storyrabbit.ai for more info.