The leaf blower

The ElevenLabs research team released Voice Isolator — a new SOTA model that removes background noise to extract crystal-clear speech from any audio. Like many ElevenLabs research breakthroughs, it appeared on my desk one day, like some divine gift from god. It didn't come from any particular customer demand. The growth team was starting from a blank canvas, working out how to launch it. I think it was Luke who seeded the initial idea: what if we did something with a leaf blower? I was off to Argos. (For the Americans reading this, Argos is like IRL Amazon.) An hour later I was back, and we filmed Jack blowing me in the face with it on the balcony. Watch it here: https://x.com/elevenlabsio/status/1808589239744921663 It got over 1 million impressions on X and LinkedIn. The Instagram and TikTok stitches drove millions more. For some added fun, I ran a mini giveaway on X — selected one person from our community and sent them the actual leaf blower with a handwritten note. He put it on his wall: https://x.com/i/status/1811758996723835272 --- For the launch of Voice Isolator v2, we did it again. More leaf blowers this time: https://x.com/elevenlabsio/status/1980675502055534919 It didn't go nearly as viral. But it's been our top performing creative this month.