Articulatory Intelligence: giving a glacier a voice

How artist Harry Yeff and ElevenLabs are turning climate data into education and conversation.

A glaciologist spends their entire career learning to read ice. The data is vast - satellite measurements, ocean temperature models, seismic records - and the expertise required to interpret it is deep. But what if that same knowledge could meet a teacher, a policymaker, or a curious teenager in a form they could more easily engage with?

This is the question at the heart of Agentic Thwaites Glacier, a project by ElevenLabs' Artist-in-Research Harry Yeff (@reepsone) that gives one of the world's most critical and endangered environments something it has never had: a voice.

From data to dialogue

Agentic Thwaites Glacier is built on a foundation of open-source scientific datasets:

• Satellite measurements from NASA and the European Space Agency.
• Scientific records from the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration.
• Climate and oceanographic models from NOAA and the British Antarctic Survey.

Layered together, these sources form the knowledge base of a conversational AI agent.Through custom voice design and ElevenAgents, the glacier becomes an interactive presence. Audiences can ask questions and receive answers drawn from real scientific data, delivered with a poetic sensibility that makes the scale of change feel immediate and personal.

The work was presented at the United Nations AI for Good initiative, where it initiated over 3,000 conversations, and was described as a glimpse into the future of human-machine collaboration.

A new genre of education

Yeff calls this approach Articulatory Intelligence - a term that captures something specific about what this technology makes possible. Not just the retrieval of information, but the articulation of it. The ability to take vast, complex data and transpose it into something conversational, and bespoke to whoever is asking.

"Articulatory Intelligence is simply a new way to move knowledge," Yeff explains. "To take data or concepts that exist within deep fields of expertise and make them conversational. Tangible, explorable, experiential."

His work is driven by a genuine passion for the role  conversational AI can play in education. The ability to translate complex datasets into something responsive and deeply personal opens a kind of learning experience that was simply not possible before. "When knowledge becomes experiential, it stops being something you receive and becomes something you engage with," Yeff says. "This is what I believe the future of education looks like."

Art and accuracy in the same breath

In Yeff’s work, AI agents are becoming a new kind of artistic and educational medium. The agents are built to find the right detail and metaphor for the person asking. Yeff is deliberate about refusing to separate the two.

"We are told we live in the information age," Yeff says. "I want to leverage this technology to lean towards a new age of understanding."

Agentic Thwaites Glacier is part of a broader initiative called Agentic Voicing Natures, which extends the same approach to other endangered species and environments - including Raja, one of the oldest known Bengal tigers, the Dodo, and the Northern White Rhino. Each agent draws on ecological data, environmental soundscapes, and the history of its species to create a voice that is scientifically grounded and emotionally resonant.

Harry Yeff (Reeps100) is ElevenLabs' Founding Artist in Research and Curator of the AI Visionary Initiative at the ITU United Nations. Learn more about his work at reeps100.com