ElevenLabs CEO Says Voice Will Replace Screens as AI’s Primary Interface

At Web Summit in Doha, ElevenLabs’ co-founder laid out a near-term vision in which spoken interaction becomes the primary way people control AI: richer emotional speech synthesis paired with models that retain context and memory will let agents act with less prompting, returning phones to pockets while ambient voice surfaces in headsets, glasses and cars. The company said it will pursue a hybrid architecture that splits workloads between edge models on devices and heavier cloud inference to address latency, bandwidth and privacy trade-offs for wearables. ElevenLabs also disclosed a major financing milestone: a $500 million investment round led by Sequoia Capital that values the firm at roughly $11 billion, with a Sequoia partner set to join the board. Management framed the capital as a lever to accelerate multimodal agent work that combines speech, text and video, expand commercial footprints across Asia and Latin America, and broaden its creative suite beyond pure voice tools. Behind that financing was continued commercial momentum: the company reported ARR north of $300 million and rapid recent revenue growth, which helped convert traction into investor appetite. Strategic investors in the round were partly kept confidential, suggesting some participants are joining for distribution or partnership advantages in addition to financial return. Product partnerships, including integrations with Meta for Instagram and Horizon Worlds, indicate distribution pathways that embed voice across social and immersive environments rather than leaving it as a standalone feature. ElevenLabs said the new funding will also underwrite work on safety, content moderation and IP protections — areas that scale with compute and governance needs. Yet the CEO’s vision for persistent, memory-driven voice assistants concentrates sensitive behavioral signals: continuous audio capture can reveal habits, contexts and identities, raising risks of misuse, unwanted inference and regulatory attention. Competing cloud and device vendors are aggressively prioritizing audio, making the market crowded and increasing the value of distribution ties, on-device performance, and credible privacy controls. For product teams, the shift means new engineering burdens — stronger edge compute, hybrid orchestration, and nuanced consent mechanics — while for investors the round signals confidence that voice-enabled services can scale commercially, though clear monetization routes remain evolving. Policymakers are likely to scrutinize storage, consent, and ambient-inference rules, shaping how persistent voice memories can be implemented. The next 12–24 months will test which companies can translate voice breakthroughs into mass adoption by combining convincing on-device experience, secure cloud augmentation, platform partnerships and robust governance.