
A flat Polish film voiceover stayed with Mati Staniszewski long after school. With his oldest friend, he turned that irritation into ElevenLabs, then followed the question much further: what should a machine sound like when it talks back?

A childhood irritation with flat Polish film voiceovers became a technical problem Piotr Dabkowski could not leave alone. The ElevenLabs cofounder now leads the research behind voices designed to carry feeling across languages.