“The core competitiveness of ElevenLabs' voice Artificial Intelligence (AI) is its expressive power that captures human breath and emotional curves as they are,” said Hong Sang-won, country manager of ElevenLabs Korea, in a recent interview with Electronic Times. “Beyond simply reading text, it can understand context and perform emotional acting.”
Hong stated that ElevenLabs, which handles all things related to sound, sees telecommunications, media, gaming industries, and call centers as key target markets in Korea. He plans to target the domestic voice AI market with services that integrate multi-language support and voice AI technology.
Based on a multi-language engine that processes more than 99 languages with the same level of naturalness, ElevenLabs supports voice AI that can understand not only conversation but also non-verbal expressions. Hong noted that the technology can record by separating speakers while minimizing noise in meetings where multiple people participate.
Its strength lies in providing the entire field of voice AI--including Text-to-Speech (TTS), Speech-to-Text (STT), voice cloning, and agents--on a single platform. Already, more than half of Fortune 500 companies have adopted ElevenLabs, and the company rose to become a 'decacorn' just three years after its founding. Hong highlighted that ElevenLabs technology is serving as a bridge between different languages through content localization.
Hong explained, “Recently, people have started to consider the use of voice AI from the new content planning stage. This is a strategy to minimize the possibility of issues such as complex rights distribution after content completion.”
In Korea, the company has secured major clients including media companies such as KBS and MBC, as well as LG Uplus, Naver, and Krafton. He mentioned the AI-based production of audio content for Spoon Labs as a representative use case.
“As the demand for voice AI in Korea is increasing among enterprise corporations and the content industry, we will target the market with our quality-driven technology,” Hong explained. He added that more than 2 million voice AI agents are currently operating on the ElevenLabs platform.
In addition, the company has secured voice data from more than 11,000 people. Hong emphasized that this is the result of ordinary people voluntarily providing their voices through a structure that clarifies individual identity and provides fair compensation.
Hong concluded by saying, “Just as voice AI is being used for administrative processing in Ukraine, we can also contribute to the public sector. This year, I will focus on establishing ElevenLabs as a representative voice AI company in Korea.”
Meanwhile, ElevenLabs will participate in the 'CAIO Forum' hosted by Electronic Times on the 21st. At the forum, Hong is scheduled to present on the company's AI technology competitiveness and global trends.
