Disclosure certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

ElevenLabs partnered with Ukraine to add voice capabilities to Diia

Mati Staniszewski · The world of voice AI, with Mati Staniszewski of ElevenLabs · Apr 14, 2026 · at 57:54

Mati Staniszewski, CEO of ElevenLabs, explains how ElevenLabs assisted Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation during the war to make government services accessible via voice AI.

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“We traveled to Kiev. We worked with them on bringing that and making that available for voice so everybody can access it.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Mati Staniszewski

Prediction Not checkable as stated
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs hopes to pass voice Turing test within a year
“Our goal is to like pass the voice Turing test in all those cases, or the Turing test for all conversational agents outside of voice two. And I hope we will be there in the next year or so.”
Mati Staniszewski Apr 14, 2026 ▶ 20:44 The world of voice AI, with Mati Staniszewski of ElevenLabs
Disclosure
ElevenLabs bets research on cascaded voice architecture over speech-to-speech
“So today we are optimizing heavily on a cascaded approach... So that's like where we are betting a lot of the research work of how you can make that great, and we think we can make that great.”
Mati Staniszewski Apr 14, 2026 ▶ 28:33 The world of voice AI, with Mati Staniszewski of ElevenLabs
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Staniszewski: Speech-to-speech models are 'definitely dumber' due to size limits
“They are definitely dumber. You need smaller model, you cannot... If you are going speech to speech, usually you will use smaller models, so it's still quick.”
Mati Staniszewski Apr 14, 2026 ▶ 30:01 The world of voice AI, with Mati Staniszewski of ElevenLabs
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Staniszewski: Accents and emotion are emergent properties in ElevenLabs models
“And in our approach, effectively, you would give the model open-ended ability to select what those parameters should be. So it's not going to be British, Polish, Spanish, English speaker but the model will deduce them themselves. The same for other set of para…”
Mati Staniszewski Apr 14, 2026 ▶ 4:00 The world of voice AI, with Mati Staniszewski of ElevenLabs
Assertion Supported
ElevenLabs expressive mode lets voice agents detect and match human emotions
“So today, finally, you can have both speed generation or entire voice agent experience With what we call expressive mode where the agent knows the emotions on the other side. So if the person is stressed, it can react and be reassuring and that's generating a …”
Mati Staniszewski Apr 14, 2026 ▶ 26:57 The world of voice AI, with Mati Staniszewski of ElevenLabs
Insight
Staniszewski: Solving conversational voice AI inherently solves text agents too
“If you fix the voice agent, you'll have fixed text piece or like inherently as well.”
Mati Staniszewski Apr 14, 2026 ▶ 43:07 The world of voice AI, with Mati Staniszewski of ElevenLabs
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