How Deutsche Telekom is bringing voice AI across its business with ElevenLabs

Deutsche Telekom, Europe's largest telecommunications company, partnered with ElevenLabs to bring AI voice technology across multiple areas of the business - integrating AI into the network itself and making it available from consumer products through to customer service.

Creating richer calling experiences with AI

Deutsche Telekom sought to bring richer experiences to the phone call and wanted it to work for every customer. That meant embedding ElevenAgents directly into the network infrastructure, so the assistant works on any mobile device that can make a phone call. The result, unveiled at Mobile World Congress in March 2026, is the Magenta AI Call Assistant.

With the world's first network-integrated AI call assistant, Deutsche Telekom subscribers will be able to access:

• Contextual assistance: answering questions, retrieving relevant information, or performing tasks in real time
• Real-time translation: when language barriers arise, each party on a call can speak and listen in their own language
• Call summarization: customers can review notes and retrieve follow-ups directly from their Magenta app

To make this possible, ElevenLabs offers AI voice technology with the low latency, high concurrency, and audio quality that the carrier-grade deployment demands.

Collaborating on this is not just about plugging in a solution from a partner. It is about jointly learning how to make AI carrier-grade: fast enough for the AI-native world, but trusted, secure and reliable for Deutsche Telekom and our customers.

- Christoph Hilz, Group SVP Core Network & Services, Deutsche Telekom

Making agentic customer service more effective with a voice customers trust

Deutsche Telekom handles millions of contact center calls a year, and each one is a chance to win or lose a customer's trust. A voice that sounds too robotic can cost that trust before the agent ever gets a chance to help.

Deutsche Telekom brought ElevenLabs into its contact center for voice quality that earns trust from the very start of each call. Since launch, a greater share of customers give the AI agent a chance to resolve their questions end to end.

In the contact center, the only moment you have to foster trust is when you say hello. Given the state-of-the-art voice quality that ElevenLabs has, customers will give us a chance.

- Sahil Sakhuja, Head of AI Products, Deutsche Telekom

Offering new AI products in their app

The partnership between ElevenLabs and Deutsche Telekom began in early 2025, when Deutsche Telekom wanted to give customers a low-friction way to experience what AI can do.

Those first products are still active and expanding today. They include GenFM, which converts news into AI-generated podcasts, features where customers can interact with famous figures like Einstein, and access to ElevenReader Ultra in select markets for premium audiobooks and text-to-speech.

A partnership built in the same room

Integrating AI into carrier infrastructure didn’t have an established playbook. ElevenLabs Forward Deployed Engineers worked directly with the Deutsche Telekom team, often on-site in Germany, providing hands-on technical support throughout the integration and helping Deutsche Telekom quickly bring new products to market.

Collaborating with ElevenLabs felt like adding new team members. That's what made this collaboration so successful, and it gave us the headway to be first, very often, when it comes to a new launch.

- Lena Drubel, VP Consumer AI, Deutsche Telekom

Looking forward

What began as a set of app features has grown into deployments across customer service and the network itself. For two companies with deep ties to and investments in voice, the partnership continues to expand.

This is fundamentally more than just a technology rollout. It's an opportunity for us to rewrite and redesign how our company operates from the ground up.

- Jonathan Abrahamson, Chief Product Officer, Deutsche Telekom