Give Your Chat Agent a Voice — Luke Harries, Head of Growth, ElevenLabs
May 9, 2026 · 8:12
Luke Harries from ElevenLabs argues that the next upgrade for chat agents is a voice layer, not smarter prompts or RAG, and introduces the company's Voice Engine to wrap existing agents via a few lines of code. He demonstrates how text-in, text-out chat agents can be converted to voice agents using a single prompt, leveraging ElevenLabs' advanced turn-taking, emotion-aware interruption detection, and Scribe for speech-to-text. The Voice Engine provides server and client SDKs, plus Shadcn-based UI components, enabling omni-channel deployment like phone calls and Zoom. Harries also addresses tool calling, noting that the wrapper proxies calls to existing agent logic without rebuilding. He predicts that chat agents will either adopt voice or become obsolete.
