ElevenLabs partners with the UK Government to bring voice AI to public services, as it expands London HQ

Today, we signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the UK's Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) to find new ways to use voice AI to improve public services, deepen our work on AI security, and invest in the UK's position as a global hub for voice and audio AI talent. 

We want to make the UK one of the best places in the world to build, deploy and use AI, so alongside this partnership, we’re also expanding our UK operations, doubling our headcount this year, and building out our executive team in London. 

The MOU

The high-level agreement covers three areas of collaboration:

• Public services and accessibility. We'll work with DSIT to explore how voice AI can make government information more accessible - with particular focus on the blind and visually impaired, those with low literacy or learning differences, elderly citizens, and the UK's many linguistically diverse communities, including Welsh-language services.
• AI security. We'll deepen our existing research partnership with the UK AI Security Institute, extending our controlled research into how people perceive AI-generated voices and conversational agents - including whether they can identify when they're speaking to an AI, and how that knowledge affects their behaviour.
• Talent and upskilling. We'll collaborate with DSIT to attract and develop AI expertise in the UK, with a focus on voice and audio AI, and explore how AI can support workforce development and reskilling.

“Voice AI could make a real difference to how people access public services - whether that’s helping someone with a visual impairment listen to information, supporting people with low literacy to understand it more easily, or making them easier to use for the elderly,” said AI Minister Kanishka Narayan. “Through this partnership, we’ll test how these tools work in practice - building our understanding of AI security and supporting the development of homegrown AI talent. Done right, this technology won’t just be cutting-edge - it will make a real difference to how people get the help and opportunities they need.”

Doubling down in the UK

The MOU comes as we're expanding our operations in the UK. This year, we will move into a new London headquarters, which is triple the size of our existing office, and double our UK headcount to 200 people across research, engineering, sales and other teams.

Alongside our government work, this expansion will allow us to support a growing number of ambitious UK companies who want to transform how they communicate with their customers and other audiences. These include Revolut, which uses our voice agents to serve 4 million customers in 30 languages across the UK and Europe; Deliveroo, which streamlines rider onboarding by having voice agents proactively reach out to applicants; and Trainline, where voice agents handle refunds.

We are also continuing to build our global executive team from London, with the appointment of Alex Holt as our Field CTO. Alex joined ElevenLabs in 2023, as one of our first 10 employees, and has been invaluable in building out our engineering and enterprise functions. In this role, he will lead our core engineering teams and forward deployed engineering function, working directly with our largest enterprise customers around the world to build solutions for their hardest operational problems. His teams grapple with the messy reality of integrating AI into established companies, and in doing so, speed up the diffusion of AI across the UK and globally.

“The businesses and governments that figure out how to integrate AI into their operations and services are going to define the next decade,” said Alex Holt, Field CTO at ElevenLabs. “The UK has the engineering talent, the enterprise ambition, and the government commitment to lead the way. I’m delighted to take on this role and help organisations globally transform how they communicate with their most important audiences.”

Building across UK public life

Today's announcement builds our existing collaborations with UK institutions which play an important role in public life.

In healthcare, we work with leading UK patient advocacy organisations to provide free AI voice technology to people living with MND, Multiple System Atrophy, head and neck cancer, and other conditions that cause permanent voice loss. Partnering with organisations like the Motor Neurone Disease Association (MNDA), the Scott-Morgan Foundation, Smartbox, the MSA Trust, University College London, and the Mouth Cancer Foundation, we have helped thousands of UK citizens to speak in their own voice again. We also provide free access to their speech and language therapists, and support over 70 languages, including Welsh.

In education, we offer free API access and research support to academics. UK partners include Prof. Carolyn McGettigan (UCL), one of the world's leading researchers on voice perception and speech science; Dr. Ting Sun (UCL), who uses ElevenLabs to create multilingual lecture content for globally diverse student cohorts; Prof. Pinar Ozcan (University of Oxford, Saïd Business School), who has cloned her voice to scale online course delivery; and Dr. Sepehr Abrishami (University of Portsmouth), who is integrating AI voice into engineering education.

ElevenLabs for Government

Our collaboration with DSIT will draw on ElevenLabs for Government, our dedicated public sector programme. Deploying AI in public services is one of the best ways to ensure the benefits of this technology are felt broadly, and we are already working with governments in:

• Ukraine - to make it easier to access public services on the Diia app via voice, and to  power voice agents that can provide 24/7 support for government hotlines, designed to maintain consistent operations amid wartime conditions. 
• The Czech Republic - to handle over 5,000 calls per day about employment benefits that were previously going unanswered.  
• Greece - to enhance public services, create new voice experiences for tourists, and preserve endangered dialects that are now only spoken by a few hundred elderly citizens in remote locations. 

This partnership is a meaningful step towards ensuring voice AI benefits everyone in the UK, and we are looking forward to building together in the months ahead.