India, Oct. 6 -- The voice sounded human. But that was almost beside the point.

On stage in Bengaluru, ElevenLabs Co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski demonstrated AI speech that could slow down, shift tone, inject emotion, react, and follow performance directions embedded in text. The company's new Eleven v4 and v4 Turbo models are being pitched as its most emotive yet, with speech across more than 90 languages.

The bigger point, however, was not that machines can increasingly sound like people.

It was what happens when that voice becomes the front end of an agent capable of representing a business.

ElevenLabs says its agents now handle more than 15 million conversations every week globally, three times the level six months ago. In I...