ElevenLabs and IBM have announced that they are entering into a strategic partnership to integrate ElevenLabs’ Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Speech-to-Text (STT) functionality into IBM’s watsonx Orchestrate. This is to improve agentic AI experiences through more natural and human-like voice interactions that meet enterprise needs for security and compliance.
With the proliferation of agentic AI agents in various customer and employee interactions for enterprises, voice has become an important interface for interacting with these agents. However, voice interfaces often come with limitations such as wait times, scripted interactions, and unnatural speech patterns that result in poor experiences. This new integration is designed to overcome all these limitations through the inclusion of premium voice interactions that can mimic human-like interactions in over 70 different languages.
“AI agents are becoming central to everyday work, and voice is where AI either earns trust or loses it,” said Mati Staniszewski, Co-founder at ElevenLabs. “Together with IBM, we’re helping organizations replace robotic interactions with AI agents that people actually want to talk to, built with the security and compliance controls that enterprises require.”
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Elevating Agentic AI With Voice-First Experiences
With this integration, the scope of AI agents is expanded to go beyond text-based interactions. This is extremely useful for industries that need to communicate in multiple languages. Some of these industries include government services, healthcare, financial services, and utility companies.
For example, government services can use voice-enabled AI agents to communicate with different communities within the country. On the other hand, companies can improve their customer experience and sales with voice-enabled AI agents.
With IBM watsonx Orchestrate technology, this solution offers a unified environment for building, deploying, and managing AI agents. The integration is smooth with other existing systems and tools within an enterprise.
With this partnership, companies can now benefit from ElevenLabs’ voice library that has over 10,000 voices and supports different accents and languages. This is extremely useful for companies that operate in different parts of the world and want to offer personalization to different cultures.
Enterprise-Ready Security and Scalability
One of the major aspects of the partnership is the focus on ensuring that the voice-enabled AI technology meets the strict needs of the enterprise world. The integration has also provided advanced security features, including PCI compliance for safe payment processing, Zero Retention Mode for safe and compliant handling of data in the healthcare industry, and data residency.
The features make it possible for organizations to implement AI agents that are capable of handling multiple conversations concurrently in a consistent and secure manner.
“We’re bringing a voice to AI Agents in the enterprise. As clients increasingly deploy agentic AI that interacts with their customers and employees, they want these experiences to feel intuitive, responsive and accessible,” said Nick Holda, Vice President, AI Technology Partnerships at IBM. “IBM’s open ecosystem approach offers clients the flexibility to choose the models and tools that fit their business, and our integration of ElevenLabs into watsonx Orchestrate is a powerful example of that – enabling enterprises to deploy AI agents that sound natural, scale globally, and address security, reliability and governance.”
Driving the Future of Conversational AI
This partnership, therefore, reflects a wider trend towards more human-centric experiences of artificial intelligence, in which voice is a key driver of trust and engagement. The partnership between ElevenLabs and IBM, therefore, allows organizations to leverage the power of more advanced speech technologies to create more immersive, efficient, and scalable experiences of artificial intelligence.
The role of agentic artificial intelligence, therefore, calls for the integration of more advanced voice capabilities to bridge the gap between artificial intelligence and human communication.