ElevenLabs announced at its New York Summit on November 11 that people living with permanent voice loss can now get free access to ElevenMusic, so artists who can no longer sing can keep composing and releasing music. The program launches with Songwriters of North America (SONA), which will verify eligibility and distribute access.
At its New York Summit, ElevenLabs announced new models, agents and deployment options for its AI interaction layer, including the Interaction Engine that manages turn-taking and routes each part of a conversation to a cheaper or frontier LLM. ElevenAgents gains Memory, which builds a structured record of returning customers, and Routines, an automation layer for multi-step work before, during and after calls. ElevenLabs also previewed the ElevenAI workplace app with free early access opening today, launched a Partner Program now at more than 550 partners in 44 countries plus a McKinsey alliance, and introduced the ElevenLabs Marketplace; NVIDIA's Nemotron 3.5 Super VL is now available in ElevenAgents alongside 15 MW of new Vera Rubin compute capacity.
ElevenLabs and NVIDIA have expanded their collaboration across models, infrastructure and sovereign deployments, bringing NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Super VL into the ElevenAgents platform. ElevenLabs plans to add 15MW of NVIDIA Vera Rubin capacity on top of its existing Blackwell Ultra systems, and is powering a voice agent for Poland's Centralna e-Rejestracja appointment system on-premises using NVIDIA Confidential Computing. On the ElevenAgents customer-support benchmark, Nemotron 3.5 Super VL reached leading end-to-end task-completion accuracy at 70% lower cost than other leading open models, according to ElevenLabs.
McKinsey and ElevenLabs announced an alliance to help organizations prove the value of conversational AI through initial use cases before scaling across the enterprise. The partnership combines McKinsey's industry and transformation expertise, including QuantumBlack's AI engineering, with ElevenLabs' frontier conversational AI technology and ElevenAgents platform. Dutch telecom KPN is already using the new AI-powered solutions, and the alliance plans to extend the approach to service-intensive industries such as insurance.
ElevenLabs says enterprises now account for more than 55% of its revenue, with its technology in daily operations at five of the 10 largest tech companies, five of the 10 largest insurers and four of the 10 largest telecoms. At its NYC Summit, clients including Ramp, Customers Bank, Banco Inter, Clover Health and FOX Sports described using ElevenAgents and ElevenCreative for support agents, onboarding, multilingual service and an AI persona of commentator Colin Cowherd in the FOX Sports App.
Clerk AI is running enterprise voice and messaging agents on LiveKit's open-source framework and global edge network, handling over 1,000 concurrent voice sessions without pre-provisioning. Agents respond in under 500ms and support 30+ languages natively, with ScreenSense call screening at 97% accuracy and TrueReach voicemail detection above 98%. The platform keeps full control over STT, LLM, and TTS providers and holds SOC 2 Type II certification with built-in TCPA compliance.
Vapi gathered over 30 voice AI builders on a chartered yacht in San Francisco Bay on October 8 for Fleet Week, with fireside chats from Deepgram, Kouper Health and Coval plus a technical workshop. Attendees focused on GPT Live speech-to-speech, which cuts latency and yields fluid turns but trades off granular control over key terms and scripting. Discussions also covered backchanneling, perceived latency and platform versus in-house voice stacks.
LiveKit launched a Startup Program giving eligible startups about $23,000 in total value: $7,000 in inference credits across seven partners, $10,000 in LiveKit Cloud credits, and one year of the Scale plan normally priced at $500 per month. Models from partners including Deepgram, AssemblyAI, and LiveKit-hosted Gemma 4 31B are available through LiveKit Inference without separate provider accounts or API keys. The program targets startups with fewer than 50 employees that have raised less than $5 million and are building voice, video, or physical AI into their products.
Vapi is bringing its voice AI summit back as VapiCon 2026, expanding to two days and two tracks at Fort Mason, San Francisco, on November 11 and 12, 2026, for 1,200+ builders and operators. Confirmed speakers include Deepgram's Scott Stephenson, LangChain's Harrison Chase, Vercel's Guillermo Rauch, Twilio's Andy O'Dower, Cartesia's Brandon Yang, and Arize AI's Laurie Voss, alongside Vapi's Jordan Dearsley and Nikhil Gupta. Sessions will cover speech-to-speech versus cascaded architectures, evals and observability, sub-second time to first byte, human handoff, and production deployments in healthcare and contact centers.
VapiCon 2026, the voice AI summit hosted by Vapi, expands to two days on November 11 and 12 at the Festival Pavilion at Fort Mason, with plans for 1,200+ attendees, 50+ speakers, and 20+ sponsors. The first edition drew more than 850 people in San Francisco on October 2, 2025, and tickets for 2026 are on sale now.
Vapi has hired Nathalie Criou as its VP of Product, a few months after she joined the voice AI startup. Criou previously held product and general management roles at Google, VMware, Amazon, Twilio and Docker, and founded and sold the startup RidePal. She said she joined because voice is an underused channel that AI can now transform, citing customer Kavak reorganizing around voice within six months.
Vapi has named Jayson Noland, who spent over a decade in tech finance and helped take Cloudflare public and past $1 billion in revenue, as its Chief Financial Officer. Noland joins at the Series B stage to build out the finance function, from scalable systems to capital allocation, citing voice agents as the next major human-machine interface.
Vapi is pitching its voice AI platform as a way for brands to turn the contact center from a cost center into a competitive advantage, citing Amazon Ring, which evaluated over 40 voice AI vendors before going live on Vapi in two weeks and now runs 100% of its inbound CX volume through it, with improved CSAT scores. Vapi argues packaged voice solutions lock brands into vendor-controlled models and generic voices, while building from scratch is slow and costly, and it touts sub-second response times, VPC-resident architecture with zero data retention and PII scrubbing, and deployments that go live in days.
Vapi announced a $50M Series B led by Peak XV, with YC, M12, Kleiner Perkins and earlier investors participating, bringing total funding to $72M. The round follows a year in which Vapi's enterprise revenue grew 10x and its voice agents crossed 1,000,000,000 calls handled. Vapi says Amazon Ring moved from evaluation to running 100% of inbound calls on its platform in two weeks, with CSAT rising.