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Staniszewski: ElevenLabs hopes to pass voice Turing test within a year

Mati Staniszewski · The world of voice AI, with Mati Staniszewski of ElevenLabs · Apr 14, 2026 · at 20:44

Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, discusses the technical hurdles of voice AI orchestration with Stripe co-founder John Collison.

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“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.”

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

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
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs added $100M net new ARR in one quarter
“This quarter was kind of one of the best for enterprise growth, where we had the first quarter hit a hundred million in an additional ARR growth, which is crazy.”
Mati Staniszewski Apr 14, 2026 ▶ 44:33 The world of voice AI, with Mati Staniszewski of ElevenLabs
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