ElevenLabs CEO Says AI Speech May Pass Turing Test This Year
ElevenLabs is working to make voice AI indistinguishable from human conversation, with its CEO, Mati Staniszewski, stating the company may cross the Turing test threshold this year or in early 2026. The test determines a machine’s ability to exhibit human-like intelligence. “We would love to prove that it’s possible this year,” Staniszewski said in a recent interview. “You can cross the Turing test of speaking with an agent, and you just would say this is like speaking with another human.” The company is currently using a cascading architecture, separating speech-to-text, language generation, and text-to-speech, but is preparing to shift to a unified duplex model. “Soon, the one we’ll deploy will be a truly duplex model,” he said. According to Staniszewski, the key trade-off lies between expressiveness and reliability. “The true duplex model will always be quicker, a little bit more expressive, but less reliable,” he said. “The cascaded model is definitely more reliable…but maybe not as contextually responsive.” Latency, too, remains a challenge. “I think we can get pretty good latency on both sides,” Staniszewski noted, while acknowledging that integrating audio with large language models at production scale has yet to be solved. “No company has been able to do it well…I hope we’ll be the first one.” Citing ongoing work by Meta and OpenAI in the same space, he said, “I don’t think it passed the Turing test yet.” The CEO also reaffirmed his belief that voice will become a primary interface for interacting with technology, signalling a shift in how users may engage with software in the near future. The company recently launched the alpha version of its new flagship text-to-speech model, Eleven v3, which the company claims is its most expressive model to date. The release introduces inline audio controls, dialogue generation, and support for over 70 languages, targeting creators in film, gaming, audiobooks, and accessibility.
The key trade-off lies between expressiveness and reliability, according to CEO Mati Staniszewski.
ElevenLabs is working to make voice AI indistinguishable from human conversation, with its CEO, Mati Staniszewski, stating the company may cross the Turing test threshold this year or in early 2026. The test determines a machine’s ability to exhibit human-like intelligence.
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Siddharth is a media graduate who loves to explore tech through journalism and putting forward ideas worth pondering about in the era of artificial intelligence.