We’re expanding into Korea to help make voice AI part of everyday life

We visited Korea this week to mark our official launch there. It’s a place where technology moves fast, ideas travel quickly, and people set a high bar for quality. It’s also one of the best-connected countries in the world, with near-universal mobile access, the world’s top-ranked 5G infrastructure, and strong government backing for AI research.

We started ElevenLabs in London in 2022 to build AI that gives technology a voice. From the beginning, our goal has been to make communication between people and machines feel natural - in every language. Korea is an ideal place to keep building that vision.

Why Korea matters

More than 65% of large companies in Korea already use AI, and nearly 2/3 of workers use generative AI in their daily work. The government has announced major new funding for AI and aims to make Korea one of the top three AI countries in the world.

But beyond numbers, Korea is a country that adopts new ideas early. It’s where creative industries like K-pop and K-drama shape global culture, and where expectations for digital products are among the highest anywhere. We see it as a proving ground for what good AI looks like.

What we’re bringing

Our research covers the full stack of audio AI - text to speech, speech to text, dubbing, voice cloning, and sound design. These models now support more than 70 languages and can capture tone, emotion, and nuance with unprecedented fidelity - but the biggest leap forward is happening in how these systems come together in real time.

Our Agent Platform connects speech recognition, generation, and reasoning into one system. It lets products and services interact with people through natural conversation, with latency below half a second. It supports over 7,000 voices and 32 languages, and integrates directly into tools like CRM, payments, and telephony.

One major digital bank with over 30 million customers reduced handling time by 85% after adopting the platform. It now automates half of its credit card inquiries, and the full rollout took less than two months.

Other end-to-end speech-to-speech systems struggle with observability and auditing. Ours was designed to meet enterprise standards. Model improvements in streaming ASR and TTS, and faster LLM inference, have made our latency visibly lower and our reliability higher.

How we see the future

We believe the future of AI audio will go beyond speech. Every device - from wearables to cars - will not only understand what we say but how we say it. Real-time translation and dubbing will remove language barriers entirely. And as voice connects with image and video, we’ll see a new kind of creative experience that feels personal and immediate.

Working with Korean partners

Our Korea Country Lead, Sangwon Hong, and our local team are already working with companies like MBC C&I, ESTsoft, Krafton, and SBS. Together, we want to make Korea not just a market but a center for voice AI in Asia.

We’re also committed to making sure AI is used responsibly. Our 3C Framework - Consent, Control, and Compensation - helps prevent misuse and ensures fair recognition and sharing of value.

We’re excited to build in Korea, learn from it, and grow alongside its companies, developers, and creators. It’s a place that sets the pace for what’s next, and we’re glad to be part of that.