In this section I review one AI-powered application and demonstrate how it can be used to create new value.
In a newsletter about emotion as the next frontier, it's only fitting that the tool spotlight lands on the platform that makes emotion audible. ElevenLabs is an AI voice platform that provides text-to-speech, voice cloning, dubbing, and conversational AI agents, and it does all of this with a level of emotional nuance that separates it from every other option I've tested. If this issue's PIEES framework asked how we create value across all five dimensions, ElevenLabs touches every one of them.
Voice as brand identity
Readers of Issue #8 will remember Boardy, the AI networking assistant that conducts voice conversations with an Australian accent and a warm, conversational personality. When I spoke with Boardy, the best thing was the feeling of the interaction. The conversation itself felt valuable, even before any introduction happened. That's voice AI doing what text interfaces fundamentally cannot: creating trust and openness through how something sounds, not just what it says. Boardy is a proof point that voice AI's real value is emotional connection, not faster information delivery. ElevenLabs' technology, with its 3,000+ voices and expressive mode that reads context to adjust delivery, is the infrastructure that makes these kinds of experiences possible at scale.
The non-actor content business
Solo creators are now combining tools like ChatGPT for scripting and ElevenLabs for narration with Canva or Gamma for visuals to build full course businesses. No team, no studio, no post-production. The voice layer is what transforms static material into something people actually stay engaged with.
Conversational AI agents
ElevenLabs' Conversational AI platform supports multimodal interactions with improved turn-taking, the kind of natural back-and-forth that makes a user forget they're talking to software. The business impact data is worth noting: organizations deploying voice agents report up to 66% reduction in cost per call, 35% higher first-visit conversions, and 25% improvement in customer satisfaction scores. Those numbers make sense when you consider what we discussed in the leadership section. Emotion drives behavior, and voice carries emotion in ways that chat widgets simply don't.
Eleven v3 with Expressive Mode
Released in February 2026, this is what matters most. It is emotionally intelligent, context-aware text-to-speech: it reads the meaning of your text and adjusts tone and emphasis accordingly. A sentence about loss sounds different from a sentence about celebration, without you manually tagging emotions. Across 171+ languages. This is what it means for emotion to become tangible in a product.
Professional Voice Cloning
Professional Voice Cloning captures the sound of a voice along with the subtle speech patterns and emotional range, producing a digital twin that works across 70+ languages. For organizations thinking about Personalization in the PIEES framework, this means a brand voice that is genuinely personal and consistent across every customer touchpoint, in every market. The IBM partnership announced in March 2026, integrating ElevenLabs into IBM watsonx Orchestrate, signals that enterprise adoption is accelerating. It is SOC 2 and HIPAA compliant, with GDPR coverage across EU markets.
How it compares
The numbers tell a clear story: ElevenLabs offers 3,000+ voices versus OpenAI's 11, and delivers 75ms latency versus OpenAI's roughly 200ms. OpenAI's TTS is more affordable and produces consistent, reliable output, but "consistent" and "expressive" are different goals. For straightforward narration or accessibility use cases, OpenAI is a solid, cost-effective choice. For anything where emotional nuance matters (brand storytelling, customer-facing agents, content that needs to feel human) ElevenLabs is in a different category.
Your action step
If you're thinking about where voice fits into your product or your content strategy, start with the free tier and run a real piece of your content through it. Pay attention to how it sounds, to the way it handles emphasis and emotion. That gap between information and feeling is exactly where value lives.