ElevenLabs makes AI voices. A script typed into it comes back as natural speech, a video uploaded to it comes back dubbed into another language, and an agent built on it can pick up the phone.
The company was founded in 2022 by Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski. In February 2026 it raised $500 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital, at an $11 billion valuation. A share sale for employees that September valued it at $22 billion, and by then its agents were handling more than 15 million conversations a week, for customers including Deutsche Telekom and the insurer Admiral.
From voiceovers to phone agents
Text to speech produces the narration for training videos and product demos without booking a voice artist. Dubbing translates audio and video into 90+ languages while keeping each speaker’s voice, so one recorded webinar can go out in Spanish and German.
ElevenAgents is the conversational side: agents that talk to customers on the phone and in WhatsApp. In September 2026 ElevenLabs added Reception, a ready-made AI receptionist for small businesses that answers calls around the clock and books appointments.
Voice cloning has checks built in. An instant clone needs the user to confirm they have the right and consent to clone the voice. A Professional Voice Clone can only be made of the account holder’s own voice, confirmed by a verification step.
Answering a Twilio number
The native Twilio integration imports a Twilio number with the account’s credentials, ideally a Twilio API key with limited permissions, and configures the number itself. Numbers bought from Twilio take calls in both directions. An existing business number verified in Twilio as a caller ID can only call out.
Before an inbound call connects, a personalization webhook can look the caller up. ElevenLabs sends the caller’s number to the business’s own URL while the line is still ringing, and the reply, like the customer’s name and next appointment, is loaded before the agent says hello. The caller just hears the phone ring.
For outbound campaigns, batch calling works through a CSV or Excel list, feeding extra columns such as an appointment time into each call, straight away or on a schedule.
Bookings and records mid-call
Agents act through tools. The Google Calendar integration lets an agent check free time and create events, and Cal.com and Calendly have their own. ElevenLabs flags the calendar’s update and delete tools as privileged, since they can change any event on it, and advises enabling them only where callers authenticate.
On the CRM side, a Salesforce agent searches for the caller’s existing record and creates a new lead or opportunity when there isn’t one. The HubSpot integration creates and updates records, support tickets included. Helpdesks such as Zendesk and Freshdesk are covered too, and a webhook tool reaches any other system with an API.
What arrives after the caller hangs up
When a call ends, post-call webhooks send the transcript and its analysis to the business’s own endpoint. A separate webhook reports outbound calls that never connected. An endpoint that fails 10 times in a row, with no successful delivery for seven days, is switched off automatically.
The analysis is where CRM fields come from. With data collection, the business lists what to pull out of every conversation, like the caller’s postcode or whether they agreed to a callback, and each value arrives labeled, ready for the matching field.
Reception does this without a build. Its HubSpot integration adds a summary of each call to the contact with the caller’s phone number, creating a contact when none matches and filling only empty fields. UK businesses get a held number after onboarding, able to call out while the carrier checks their documents.
Phone systems other than Twilio
SIP trunking connects an existing business phone system, or PBX, for calls in both directions. Contact center platforms have their own routes: Genesys Cloud through its Audio Connector, and Amazon Connect, which keeps the routing and the queue while the agent holds the conversation. A WhatsApp business account can be connected for both messages and calls.
The ElevenLabs API and its keys
The API covers speech, transcription, voice cloning, dubbing and agents, with official SDKs. API keys can be limited to particular endpoints and given their own credit cap. Service account keys belong to the workspace rather than a person, so an integration keeps running after the staff member who set it up leaves.
For no-code builds, n8n has a verified ElevenLabs node, maintained by ElevenLabs, for speech and transcription. ElevenLabs’ connector in Claude’s directory lets Claude create and update agents from a chat.
Workspace data is stored in the US by default, and data residency in the EU is an Enterprise feature.
Calls that leave a record
A phone agent has integration work on both sides of the call. Before it, a lookup tells the agent who’s ringing and what they last booked. After it, the transcript and the collected fields update the CRM, the diary and the helpdesk, so the next person to open the record sees the whole conversation.
Both ends are only as reliable as the customer data underneath, which is the groundwork any AI tool needs. If messages left overnight get typed into the CRM the next morning, it’s worth pricing that time, and bookings copied from a call log into a diary by hand are one of the red flags that quietly cost money.