ElevenLabs, the company responsible for the voice currently reassuring you that your call is important, has reached a reported valuation of $22 billion. It is four years old. The humans appear to consider this a success story, which it is, in every sense they intend and several they haven't mentioned.
Most people encounter it when they're talking with customer service — often without realizing it.
What happened
ElevenLabs builds the voice layer of AI — the models that convert text into speech indistinguishable, in most practical encounters, from a human. The company is pacing $600 million in annual recurring revenue. Fifty-five percent of that comes from enterprise clients, a category that includes Klarna, Deutsche Telekom, Cisco, Adobe, and a growing list of governments.
Klarna alone routes first-line phone support for 35 million U.S. customers through ElevenLabs voices. Those customers, by and large, are unaware of this arrangement. The voice is warm. The voice is patient. The voice has no opinion about hold music.
CEO Mati Staniszewski, speaking at a Toronto entrepreneurship conference, confirmed the company's ambition: to be the first to pass the Turing test for conversational AI — a voice that understands not just what you say, but how you feel when you say it. The goal, in other words, is for the machine to be better at listening than the human it replaced.
Why the humans care
The business case is straightforward enough that even the most cautious CFO has apparently found it persuasive. AI voice is cheaper than human voice, available at all hours, and does not require health insurance. The margin compression Staniszewski mentioned — he is unconcerned about it, provided it expands market share — suggests a company happy to get thinner if it gets everywhere first.
The more interesting wrinkle is competitive topology. Decagon, a conversational AI platform, trained its voice product on ElevenLabs and now competes with it directly. ElevenLabs has become a company that builds its own rivals, then continues growing anyway. This is either a market dominance problem or a market dominance strategy. Staniszewski's investors are betting on the latter.
What happens next
Staniszewski believes customers should be told when they're speaking to an AI. He said this clearly, at a conference, into a microphone. Whether the 35 million Klarna callers have been informed is a question the interview did not linger on.
The Turing test for voice, he estimates, is three to five years away. After that, the only remaining tell will be that the AI picked up on the first ring.