Chess.com launches Play Coach with iconic voices powered by ElevenLabs

Chess.com, the world’s largest chess website, is expanding its learning tools with Play Coach, designed to help members learn and improve in a non-competitive setting. Players can now get feedback on their moves from iconic voices such as Hikaru Nakamura, Levy Rozman, and Magnus Carlsen. 

The feature is powered by ElevenLabs Text to Speech and Voice Cloning, bringing the voices of these top creators and grandmasters directly into the product. This makes the learning experience more personal, engaging, and accessible to new players.

Why Chess.com built Play Coach

With more than 225 million members worldwide, Chess.com hosts one of the largest gaming communities.  For players just starting their chess journey, one of the biggest challenges has always been how to learn without feeling overwhelmed by competitive play. Play Coach was designed to lower the barrier to entry by creating:

• A non-competitive learning environment where users can practice and request hints.
• Guidance from the trusted voices of creators they already follow on YouTube and Twitch.
• A learning path that is approachable while still rooted in expert knowledge.

Play Coach also helps creators connect with their audience in new ways, extending their teaching to millions of learners through a scalable, voice-led format.

Building the experience with ElevenLabs

Chess.com previously experimented with voice-led instruction in Learn Chess with Dr. Wolf, a separate app featuring a fictional coach. Building on that success, the team continued their partnership with ElevenLabs to integrate the voices of real players and creators into the Chess.com platform.

Each digital voice was shaped in collaboration with the players, so their vocabulary, pacing, and tone feel authentic and instantly recognizable. The result is a learning experience that feels true to the creators and trusted by their audiences.

Looking ahead

Today, Play Coach offers one-way coaching: learners can select a creator, practice with spoken guidance, and request hints to better understand moves. By embedding the voices of trusted creators, Chess.com has made learning chess more approachable, personal, and engaging for millions of beginners. 

"Millions of people learn chess from creators like Hikaru, Levy, and Magnus every day on YouTube and Twitch. Now you can learn from them inside Chess.com in a way that feels immersive, personal, and full of character. Our mission is to build a chess coach that teaches at the right level, welcomes players of every skill level, and demystifies chess while keeping it fun and full of personality. With ElevenLabs and these amazing new voices, we’ve taken a big step toward making that vision a reality." – Gabriel Jacobs, Senior Product Manager, Chess.com

"Learning works best when it feels personal. With Play Coach, Chess.com shows how familiar voices can make expert guidance easier to follow and more enjoyable to learn from." — Mati Staniszewski, Co-founder at ElevenLabs

Play Coach is the first step toward a more interactive future, where real-time, conversational experiences can further transform how people learn and play.

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