Voice is about to push your phone back into your pocket. At Web Summit in Doha, ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski made the case that voice is becoming the primary way humans will interact with AI - not as a novelty feature, but as the fundamental interface replacing keyboards and touchscreens. The timing isn't coincidental. Fresh off a $500 million funding round that valued the voice AI startup at $11 billion, Staniszewski's vision reflects a broader industry shift as OpenAI, Google, and Apple race to embed conversational AI into wearables, cars, and everyday hardware.
ElevenLabs just laid out the roadmap for how you'll talk to machines in the next few years - and it doesn't involve staring at a screen. Speaking at Web Summit in Doha, co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski told TechCrunch that voice models have evolved beyond simply mimicking human speech to working in tandem with the reasoning capabilities of large language models. The result is a fundamental shift in how people interact with technology.
"Hopefully all our phones will go back in our pockets, and we can immerse ourselves in the real world around us, with voice as the mechanism that controls technology," Staniszewski said. It's a bold vision, but one that's increasingly shared across the AI industry - and one that just attracted $500 million in fresh funding at an $11 billion valuation.
The shift is already underway. OpenAI has made voice a central focus of its next-generation models, while Google has rolled out conversational capabilities across its AI products. Apple is quietly building voice-adjacent, always-on technologies through acquisitions like Q.ai. As AI spreads into wearables, cars, and other new hardware, control is becoming less about tapping screens and more about speaking.
