June 23, 2026

YOU WERE ONLY SUPPOSED TO BLOW THE BLOODY OARS OFF!! Michael Caine’s AI-Generated Voice to Narrate The Odyssey Audiobook Ahead of Christopher Nolan’s Movie.

The sprawling nature of Homer’s epic “Odyssey” poem makes it understandable why a Hollywood studio would shell out hundreds of millions of dollars to bring it to life on the screen. But in ElevenLabs‘ AI audiobook version, all it requires is four producers, several AI tools and a replica voice of Christopher Nolan stalwart Michael Caine.

The AI audio firm is using Caine’s voice to anchor a new, roughly 13-hour version of “The Odyssey” weeks before Nolan’s upcoming film hits theaters. Released on Tuesday through the company’s ElevenReader audiobook app, the new audiobook version was created entirely by AI tools, including voices on ElevenLabs’ voice library along with sounds and a score generated through the firm’s music generator. The firm hopes the AI audiobook serves as a complement to Nolan’s film, one that lets readers catch up on the source material ahead of Nolan’s epic.

“Our version of it is another retelling of it that we think is really strong — it does justice,” Dustin Blank, ElevenLabs’ head of partnerships, told Variety in a recent interview. “It has a cast of 20 characters, all from our voice library, and Michael Caine is a legend. He is a national treasure, and his voice means so much to so many people, and we thought that he, as the narrator, would be the perfect person to help tell this story for his part in it, and I think he does.”

Caine’s affiliation with ElevenLabs isn’t new, as the Oscar winner licensed his voice and likeness last year to the firm’s “Iconic Marketplace,” its collection of characters that companies can pay to use for commercial purposes. But this partnership expands the arrangement, one Blank said is rooted in “consent and compensation.” ElevenLabs pays creators every time their voices are used in ElevenReader, and in Caine’s case, he was specifically consulted about the project and approved the marketing materials, Blank said. (Whether he’s heard the final project, however, couldn’t be determined.)

I hope that ElevenLabs listened to the finished product very carefully; AI narrators have a habit of mispronouncing common words and abbreviations, betraying their synthetic nature.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll