ElevenLabs and IBM announced they are collaborating to bring ElevenLabs Text to Speech (TTS) and Speech to Text (STT) to IBM watsonx Orchestrate, an agentic AI orchestration platform, providing clients with tools to deliver richer, more natural voice interactions designed to improve agentic AI-driven experiences while also addressing the security and scalability needs of enterprises.
Voice has become a critical medium for customer and employee-facing agentic AI workflows, but long wait times, rigid call flows and robotic-sounding voices can diminish the user experience. By integrating ElevenLabs’ premium TTS technology, clients can build security and compliance-focused voice-enabled agents that communicate clearly and naturally, incorporating the nuance, emotion, and rhythm of human speech across 70 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.”
This integration expands agentic capabilities from text-based to voice-first interactions, offering organizations premium voice options that help them deliver more effective and human-centered AI experiences. Government agencies and services, for example, must support several languages to help their constituents with information about healthcare, human services, education, and civic activities. With the integration of ElevenLabs, AI phone agents can converse in 70 languages with multiple regional accents and voices. Additionally, banks, insurance companies, healthcare providers, and utilities can provide support to more communities across key cases including customer support, sales, employee experience and internal operations.
IBM watsonx Orchestrate is a unified platform that enables clients to build, deploy, manage and govern AI agents to help them automate workflows across their business. It connects to existing systems, models or automation tools allowing agent collaboration and providing a scalable foundation for trustworthy explainable enterprise AI. With this integration, clients building agents with IBM watsonx Orchestrate can access ElevenLabs’ premium speech quality and extensive library of 10,000+ voices. Clients may also access enterprise-grade protections – including PCI compliance for secured payment processing, Zero Retention Mode designed to support HIPAA-compliant data handling and data residency. The combination helps to address the consistency, security and reliability needed for enterprise-scale deployments and supports high-volume and highly concurrent interactions across global user bases.
“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.”
ElevenLabs and IBM intend to continue their collaboration, helping enterprises move beyond text-only agents and towards voice-first, human centered AI experiences designed for the enterprise with the ability to scale.
