ElevenLabs partners with IBM to bring premium voice to watsonx Orchestrate

ElevenLabs is collaborating with IBM to bring our Text to Speech and Speech to Text technology into IBM watsonx Orchestrate, an agentic AI orchestration platform. The integration gives enterprises tools to build voice-enabled AI agents that communicate naturally, across 70 languages, with the security and scalability their organizations require.

Why voice matters for enterprise AI

Voice has become a critical interface for customer and employee-facing AI workflows. But long wait times, rigid call flows, and robotic-sounding voices diminish the user experience. By integrating ElevenLabs' Text to Speech into watsonx Orchestrate, teams can replace those experiences with AI agents that carry the nuance, emotion, and rhythm of human speech.

"AI agents are becoming central to everyday work, and voice is where AI either earns trust or loses it," said Mati Staniszewski, co-founder at ElevenLabs. "Together with IBM, we're helping organizations replace robotic interactions with AI agents that people actually want to talk to, built with the security and compliance controls that enterprises require."

What the integration includes

Businesses building agents on IBM watsonx Orchestrate can now access ElevenLabs' library of 10,000+ voices across 70 languages with multiple regional accents, as well as enterprise-grade security protections, including PCI compliance for payment processing, Zero Retention Mode designed to support HIPAA-compliant data handling, and data residency options. The combination helps to address the consistency, security and reliability needed for enterprise-scale deployments and supports high-volume, concurrent interactions.

"We're bringing a voice to AI agents in the enterprise," said Nick Holda, VP of AI Technology Partnerships at IBM. "IBM's open ecosystem approach offers clients the flexibility to choose the models and tools that fit their business, and our integration of ElevenLabs into watsonx Orchestrate is a powerful example of that."

The integration is designed for organizations that deploy AI at scale and need voice experiences that are reliable, natural, and accessible across languages and communities. Government agencies, for example, often need to support multiple languages to serve constituents across healthcare, human services, education, and civic programs. Banks, insurance companies, healthcare providers, and utilities can also extend support to more communities across customer service, sales, employee experience, and internal operations. 

We intend to continue our collaboration, helping enterprises move beyond text-only agents and towards voice-first, human centered AI experiences.