The Story Behind ElevenLabs | Interview with CEO Mati Staniszewski

We've been trying to make these human voices for literally since the 1700s. Then in the early 1900s, we had the first digital synthesizers.

Are you um that it doesn't cross that threshold of actually sounding like a human and actually making you feel something? Then it shifted into Siri, which has kind of a bit of back and forth, that sounds more realistic, but again, it doesn't cross that threshold of actually sounding like a human and actually making you feel something.

No, thanks so much for having me. It's incredible to be here and speak here together about some of the work we do.

A lot of things are screen first. Most people will have the laptop, the phone most of the day in front of them. I think a lot of that will move into the background, where you will be able to be a lot more present. When I imagine, say, studying in a classroom in the future, you have on headphones, you can have the most smart physicist, mathematician, a historian helping you through learning the subject. There will be an interesting shift where voice will be a big part of the technology. Where today, when you go to other countries, other cultures, you cannot fully immerse inside the culture unless you know the language. And with voice and with technology, suddenly this will become possible, where you can speak any language in the world and fully understand not only what is said but how it's said, kind of feel a closer part, which will be just incredible future where the true language barriers, but also the cultural barriers or the things that we have never learned, will become possible.

In Poland, if you watch a foreign movie, all the voices, whether it's a male or female voice, are narrated with one single character. So, one voice speaks all the lines.

They ought to make the day that what? Well, it's 8:00 and it's not a good day.

All the emotionality, all the intonation just disappears. And then back in 2021, we realized that it's still happening. Piotr was at Google, I was at Palantir. We would explore different projects together on the weekends, and we invited the first group of users then and started kind of iterating a little bit deeper. And then we started getting good signal on what are some of the use cases that will really resonate. So when we launched in early January, we already had a few thousand people lined up that we knew were very interested in actually using the product. But then, of course, the few thousand turned into a few hundred thousand of users, and that was a magnitude probably higher than we expected in the first order.

Introducing Voice Design V3. Introducing ElevenLabs image and video. Proudly introduces Studio 3.0.

It always was a combination of, one, where do we think we can deliver value with some of the research work, but then layering the product on top. Two, where do we think there's actually a real problem? Like there are companies who have the research, there are companies who have the product, and we try to have both. And I think it's great because product can directly talk to the kind of provide the feedback what is needed to the research. Research then immediately is able to iterate on that. They can also test their models directly on the product, and with this way, you know, it just like the both kind of accelerates.