The world of voice AI, with Mati Staniszewski of ElevenLabs

Mati Staniszewski is the co-founder of ElevenLabs, the research company making audio accessible across languages and voices. He sits down with John to discuss the "voice Turing Test" and why AI has conquered text but still struggles with conversational speech. They discuss the future of human-computer interaction, including why we still can't get our phones to read a PDF properly and the massive potential for voice agents in everything from farming to healthcare. Mati also opens up about ElevenLabs’ rapid ascent to an $11 billion valuation and gives a behind-the-scenes look at how Ukraine is using their tech for digital government services.

Timestamps

(00:00:27) How audio models work

(00:08:52) ElevenLabs business model

(00:17:50) The conversational Turing Test

(00:21:01) Link by Stripe

(00:26:02) Cascaded vs speech-to-speech

(00:31:53) Universal translation

(00:51:41) Designing an AI-native org