Most people who have spoken to ElevenLabs have no idea they did. The company builds models that turn text into speech that sounds human, and much of that speech now reaches the public through customer service lines. Klarna uses it for first-line phone support covering 35 million U.S. customers. Deutsche Telekom, Cisco, Adobe and a growing number of governments are also customers. A separate part of the business serves creators, who use the platform for audiobooks, dubbing and music.
The company is four years old. It says it is pacing at $600 million in annual recurring revenue, and its backers reportedly value it at $22 billion. In a short on-stage interview with TechCrunch at Nrth, a Toronto entrepreneurship conference formerly called Elevate, co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski covered competition, model choice, disclosure and money.
Voice assistants have mostly been good at conversation: ask a question, get an answer, move on. That works for looking something up. It is less useful for someone who wants to check their calendar and then act on what they find.
OpenAI is now trying to close that gap. In an announcement on X, the company said ChatGPT Voice can do more than respond. Spoken requests can now reach connected services and start work inside ChatGPT Work, the company's environment for producing documents and handling longer tasks.
Plugins bring connected services into the conversation
The main change is plugin support. ChatGPT Voice now works with plugins for email, calendar and Slack, so users can bring those connected services into a spoken conversation rather than switching to a keyboard.
Most of the attention in AI-assisted software development has gone to tools that write code faster. Lovable is making a different case: the thing people want at the end of the process is not code, but a working product.
The latest figures suggest that case is finding buyers. Speaking at the HumanX summit in Amsterdam on Thursday, co-founder Fabian Hedin said the vibe-coding platform has crossed $600 million in annual run-rate revenue. In June, the company had put the same figure at around $500 million. That means roughly $100 million was added in the space of a few months.
Robotics has long run into the same wall. A model can describe a kitchen, a warehouse shelf or a workbench in detail, but that does not mean it knows what a robot arm should do next. Describing a scene is one skill. Acting in it is another.
Black Forest Labs, often shortened to BFL, is going after the second skill with FLUX 3 Action, a new open model built for robots. The company describes it as a world-action model, and its pitch rests less on size than on doing more with fewer parameters and less time.
From watching to acting: what a world-action model does
Most people have a list of phone calls they keep putting off: checking whether a shop still has an item, moving a dentist appointment, booking a table for Friday. None of these is hard, but each takes time, patience and often a long wait on hold. Google now wants Gemini to make those calls instead.
The company is testing a feature called "Call for Me," which lets its AI assistant phone businesses on a user's behalf. Rivals are moving the same way. AI agents such as Meta's Muse and Instinct can already place calls for their users, and Meta has been expanding what Muse can do across devices. Google's move shows that phone calls are becoming a new front in the contest between AI assistants.
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