Forum Discussion
Unsupported AI Voices Removed in Update 104
Note: After hearing from many of you, we worked with our ElevenLabs partner to restore the legacy voices to Storyline 360 as of September 26th. We’re sorry for the disruption and are working to make sure any future voice changes are communicated more clearly.
Hi everyone,
Starting with Storyline 360 update 104, several AI-generated voices will no longer be available in AI Assistant’s text-to-speech feature. This change comes as ElevenLabs, our AI Voice Generation subprocessor, is phasing out support for its legacy voices.
Which Voices Are Affected
To keep your text-to-speech narrations reliable and current, we’re removing the following voices from the voice library in Storyline 360:
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What This Means for You
Here’s how this update affects your Storyline 360 projects:
- New text-to-speech audio: The voices listed above will no longer be available for creating new narrations.
- Existing text-to-speech audio: Any audio you’ve already created with one of these voices will continue to play. However, if you try to edit that narration, Storyline 360 will display an error and automatically use the “Laura” voice.
We understand that changes like this can be disruptive, and we're here to make the transition as smooth as possible. If you have questions or need help, please don't hesitate to let us know.
Hi all! We hear your frustration about the recent removal of several AI-generated voices from Storyline 360. It's clear this change has significantly impacted your projects, and we understand how disruptive this has been, especially without advance notice. We’re genuinely sorry about how this has impacted you.
In response to your feedback, we have worked with our ElevenLabs partner to bring back legacy voices, meaning the legacy voices have returned to Storyline 360. What does that mean for you? You will now see the legacy voices listed again.
We're working with ElevenLabs directly to establish better communication channels so we can provide more advanced notice of any future voice changes and what the impact will be for you as authors.
21 Replies
Thank you very much for listening and offering a good solution. This has removed the stress placed on our projects and we are back on track. Great collaboration!
Ditto, Thank you.
Thank you for hearing us.
Hi all! We hear your frustration about the recent removal of several AI-generated voices from Storyline 360. It's clear this change has significantly impacted your projects, and we understand how disruptive this has been, especially without advance notice. We’re genuinely sorry about how this has impacted you.
In response to your feedback, we have worked with our ElevenLabs partner to bring back legacy voices, meaning the legacy voices have returned to Storyline 360. What does that mean for you? You will now see the legacy voices listed again.
We're working with ElevenLabs directly to establish better communication channels so we can provide more advanced notice of any future voice changes and what the impact will be for you as authors.
Thank you for resolving this issue and working to ensure advanced notice is provided in the future.
Hi guys,
I cannot begin to describe the outsize effect that this has had on my projects. I was working on a large raft of content that used these voices extensively. Not only have I now lost access to the voices with all of these projects in various states of development, the now highly-limited range of voices do not support the needs of my project. I am looking at over a week of voice-changes to make this viable again, and the result will be massively sub-standard compared to what we had previously.
Yes, perhaps I shouldn't have relied so heavily on these voices, but with even one week's worth of decent notice I could have avoided the issue entirely. (aside from future updates, which, let's face it, are inevitable) The fact that this was handled so abruptly, and now leaves a much more limited version of the product, is really rather disappointing.
I would love to know if there is a plan to review the legacy voices or even add new ones. Any further information from Articulate would be greatly appreciated, as I'd like to know if it's even worth my time manually replacing all the voices now, or if more changes will make any future work I do redundant.Agreed on all counts. This decision and the way it was implemented was extremely unprofessional and completely inconsiderate of the people who pay Articulate for a reliable product. I appreciate that you took the time to leave this comment. I wish there were 100 more people commenting on this issue, because I'm sure there are at least that many people who've had their projects turned upside down by this terrible decision.
If they are going to discontinue any entire section of features, they should be giving us months of notice, not days.I've been in discussion about ElevenLabs today about what happened their end and how this has affected our community so much.
Overall they've been a little more responsive and helpful than Articulate have been in their communications, and obviously at least users of their direct website had much more forewarning than us about the change.
The good news is that Eleven have confirmed that they will not remove support for Legacy voices on their direct service for the foreseeable. That means that we will still have consistent access to them through there to finish off our projects. The bad news is, of course, that this is a hugely time inefficient way to do things and will actually cost Eleven credits, which most of us might not have access to so easily.
Can anybody from Articulate please chime in publicly here? Eleven have underscored again that reinstatement of any of these voices, or additions of new ones is down to the partnership between you. You could have given us more warning, fine, past is past. What I care about now is having the confidence to be able to continue with my projects and re-set expectations with my stakeholders about when things will be really delivered, as there will now be large delays and a possible quality drop.Obviously from an e-learning standpoint the confidence to continue using this software, and be able to stake my name against it with stakeholders, is pretty much everything... and right now I simply cannot do that... And it's not a great look to both Articulate customers and partners that I'm having to go through ElevenLabs themselves to get even this basic information, as Articulate appear unable to offer any insight into the next steps other than what was in this update.
Thanks all
This change has a significant impact on my work, as many of my projects rely on the voices that were removed. If projects never required updates, this might not be an issue—but in eLearning, updates and modifications are the norm. The challenge isn’t only the extra time needed to redo voices, but also the loss of variety, especially among women’s voices, which has now been reduced considerably.
I was able to locate the legacy voices on the ElevenLabs site to make my changes and avoid redoing work, but the fact that voices were removed without warning is a bit shocking. And apparently, even when there is notice, it's only 5 days.
Well, this is just great. I'm doing post-Alpha edits on a 45 minute project with several demonstrations that uses the Aria voice exclusively. I have a script change that I'm not going to be able to make unless I either have one slide that is different, or redo the voice on the entire project. I didn't realize that the voices used in the embedded AI VTT could be removed so suddenly. This makes me rethink using AI VTT on Storyline 360 projects altogether.
My team has 8 hours worth of modules using Michael exclusively for voiceover, and we can no longer make critical updates. This is surreal.
I was able to go to ElevenLabs and locate the Legacy Voices with some searching. I could make the updates I needed to, but this is far from an ideal solution.
Any voices in the French language that will be impacted ?
