Voice AI news

ElevenLabs is now valued at $22 billion after a share sale

Employees sold $300 million of stock at twice February’s valuation, and the company raised no new money. ElevenLabs says businesses now bring in 55% of its revenue, and voice agents are its fastest-growing product.

ElevenLabs, the AI voice company, said on September 30 that a $300 million share sale by employees values it at $22 billion. Wellington and T. Rowe Price led the deal, and investors including EQT, Goldman Sachs and Singapore’s GIC bought in for the first time. The valuation is double the $11 billion of its funding round in February.

ElevenLabs makes AI voices faster and more expressive

Eleven v4 follows written performance directions. Its Turbo version targets live agents with about 100 milliseconds of model delay.

ElevenLabs released Eleven v4 and Eleven v4 Turbo on September 28. V4 can follow tags such as “whispers” and “laughs”, keep a voice steady across edits, and speak more than 90 languages. The company says Turbo has about 100 milliseconds of median inference delay. Both models support voice cloning with verified owner consent.

Google’s Gemini can now talk to customers as a video avatar

Custom faces from a photo need Google’s approval.

Google made Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar available to Gemini Enterprise customers on September 24. Businesses can build voice agents that appear as a person or a cartoon character, speak 97 languages, and look up data while they talk. Every video carries an invisible SynthID watermark.

Google’s new Gemini voices can copy a person’s voice

That person must first read a consent line. No outside test has checked the safeguard.

Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Flash-Lite TTS on September 23. The text-to-speech models speak more than 100 languages and cost about $0.54 to $0.81 per hour of audio until the end of the year. Both can clone a voice from a short sample after the voice’s owner records a consent statement.

Google now lets people speak to Gmail, Docs, and Keep

The new voice tools can search email, create a document, and organize notes. Users need to see which private information the AI used.