The tech that restored Eric Dane’s voice shows how AI can be used for good, says Rebecca Gayheart Dane

During the final weeks of his battle with ALS, the late actor Eric Dane teamed up with ElevenLabs to restore his voice with the use of artificial intelligence technology—creating an emotional moment for his family, friends, and nurses when they heard how authentic it was. “The final version of Eric’s voice sounded exactly like him,” Rebecca Gayheart Dane, his widow, said during a recent discussion at the Fast Company Grill at SXSW. “If you are familiar with him at all, you know he had a very distinct voice and he had a distinct way of telling his stories—he was witty, acerbic, he just had a lot of personality—and this voice captured that so perfectly. It sounded so real.” ElevenLabs, the New York-based AI voice technology company that made all of that possible, now has its sights set on providing one million people with free access to voice-restoration technology. But that wasn’t part of its original mission; rather, the company launched in 2022 with a voice model that turned text into