Insight
Audio AI progress requires architectural breakthroughs rather than raw compute scale
“The main part that I think is different in audio space is that you don't need the scale as much as you need the, Architectural breakthroughs, the model breakthroughs to really make a dent.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Dec 2027
Voice conversational AI will pass the Turing test within a year
“I think this is, is good for customer support or customer experience, but it's still a way away from like conversation like we have and like passing that Turing test. So I think this is still like a, at least a year, like within a year. And then you will have …”
Insight
Staniszewski: AI research is only a head start; ecosystems create lasting value
“The thing that will really give that long-term value is the ecosystem that you create around, whether that's the run and distribution, whether that's the collection of voices you can have, the collection of integrations you can build, the workflows that you ca…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Staniszewski: Cascaded voice architectures will dominate enterprise for 1–2 years
“And of course, depending on the use case, if you are, like, enterprise-reliable use case, the cascaded approach is the approach for the next year to...”
Assertion Supported
ElevenLabs reached $300M ARR, split evenly between self-serve and enterprise
“We are at three hundred million in, in, in ARR, which is roughly fifty-fifty between SelfServe, so a lot of subscription and creators using our creative platform, and then Approaching 50% on the enterprise side using our agents platform work, and that's on the…”
Assertion Supported
Ukraine's government partnered with ElevenLabs to build agentic public services
“Recently I went to Ukraine where we are working with Ministry of Transformation, where they are effectively creating a first agent in government, and the crazy thing is, they have all of those.”
Assertion Supported
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs' Scribe v2 hits 93.5% accuracy under 150ms latency
“We just released our speech-to-text model, Scribe v.II, which is under a 150 milliseconds, 93.5% accuracy across the top 30 languages on, on Flourers. And it's only top 30 here because we serve so many others, but most of the people don't. So so it's so it's b…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs has over 5 million monthly active creative users
“And we serve more than five million monthly actives on that creative side of the work.”
Insight
Staniszewski: Voice agent success requires system integrations, not just orchestration
“There's the product layer that starts forming that it's not only the orchestration that matters. It's also the integrations of how you link up to the legacy systems, how you build functions around it, or how you deploy that in production and test, monitor, eva…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Staniszewski: Real-time audio dubbing will break global language barriers
“And I still think actually this market will be immense because it's not going to be only the static delivery in movies, but if you travel around the world and want to communicate in real time, like the full bubble fish idea from Hedgehacker's Guide to Galaxy, …”
Insight
Voice AI benchmarking remains unsolved due to subjective user preferences
“I think it's an unsolved problem still, where I think you have good benchmarks, of course, in LMS, I think in image space, they are pretty good. In voice space, you have, of course, the speech quality, but then so much of whether you like or not the speech dep…”
Disclosure
Legacy annotation firms failed at audio emotion labeling, forcing in-house creation
“The understanding of how you describe audio data is still lagging in the industry. Like, when we initially started, we, of course, went into the traditional players for them to help us label not only what was said, so, like, transcription, but also how it was …”
Assertion Supported
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs powered interactive Darth Vader voice in Fortnite
“We worked with them on bringing the voice of Darth Vader and Darth Vader into Fortnite, where millions of players could interact with Darth Vader live in the game, where you had like a full experience of Darth Vader in a, in, in, in a new way.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Staniszewski: Headphone-based personal tutors will be voice AI's biggest shift
“And then I think the one that's, that I'm most excited about for the world and for the shift is going to be education, where you will just be able to have, like, effectively a personal tutor on your headphone.”
Opinion
ElevenLabs employs roughly 10 of the world's top 100 audio researchers
“We think there's maybe 50 to a hundred researchers in audio space that could do it. We think we have probably 10 of them in the company that that are some of the best ones.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Staniszewski: Future education will split between AI tutors and tech-free human learning
“You will have education, good percent of time spent with AI tutors, but then explicit percent of time spent without any technology, human to human, so you can kind of learn that part, too.”
Assertion Supported
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs has grown to 350 employees globally
“So we've grown to all, 350 people globally.”
Disclosure
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs employs 'voice sommelier' team for enterprise branding
“We have, like, a voice sommelier, effectively, with us. We work with enterprises. We deploy that person to Work with them and help them navigate. That person is like a voice coach, has an incredible voice themselves, and now we have, like, a team under that pe…”
Disclosure
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs builds product workarounds if research takes over 3 months
“And rough rule of thumb is, like, three months. If we think it's going to be longer than three months, we would probably build it. If it's less than that, we probably won't.”
Disclosure
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs releasing low-latency emotional orchestration within months
“We are releasing, we'll be releasing over the next couple of months a new orchestration mechanism that will lower the end-to-end part we think in a great way. But second thing, which is what is so hard, is it's not going to only allow you to combine those piec…”
Mati Staniszewski