Bye Bye Siri, Alexa! 👋 Hello Eleven AI: A Voice assistant that actually works 🗣️

NANOBITS AI STORIES #3

This week's story comes from a marketing partner who transformed her client consultation process and creative workflow. What used to take her hours of manual work became minutes of automation, showing how the right AI setup can completely reshape business operations.

This captures the power of moving from generic AI tools to specialized workflows. What started as lengthy prompt engineering sessions evolved into a streamlined system that saves 55 minutes per consultation, accelerating creative testing from a 7-day process to same-day execution.

Have an AI story to share? Reply to this email or share it here with your breakthrough moments, epic failures, or unexpected discoveries, and we will showcase it in one of our next editions.

EDITOR’S NOTE

Dear Future-Proof Humans,

What if your AI assistant could actually take action on your behalf and not just answer your questions? What if voice commands could trigger complex workflows across your favorite tools instead of just answering questions?

This week, we've been exploring 11.ai, ElevenLabs' new voice assistant that connects directly to your work tools through the Model Context Protocol. Instead of the usual "Here’s everything you need to know about something" responses, this assistant performs, researches prospects in Perplexity, creates tickets in Linear, and catches you up on Slack messages.

We've been testing this alpha release and found it opens up workflows we hadn't considered before:

✓ Morning planning that creates actual tasks in Notion
✓ Customer research that pulls real data from multiple sources automatically via Perplexity
✓ Team communication summaries that surface the information you actually need

In this edition of Nanobits, we cover:

• How voice agents are transforming business workflows

• Setting up 11.ai with your essential work tools

• Real productivity gains from voice-first automation

• What this means for the future of human-computer interaction

Voice assistants have finally learned to take meaningful action. Let's explore how this changes the way you work and what possibilities it opens for your daily routines!

THE EVOLUTION OF VOICE AGENTS

Voice agents have evolved far beyond the "Here’s everything I know about blueberries" responses we've grown accustomed to hearing.

While traditional voice assistants like Siri and Alexa excel at answering questions and setting timers, the latest generation of voice agents can actually execute complex workflows across your business tools. Companies are now deploying agentic AI that handles routine order processing, automates customer support, and enables real-time business operations, transforming voice from a novelty feature into a productive assistant.

This shift represents a fundamental change in human-computer interaction, moving from simple voice commands to sophisticated agents that can break down complex tasks, access multiple systems, and deliver results without human intervention. Voice agents now analyze speech in real time, adapt to interruptions, and update responses instantly without relying on rigid scripts. The applications span from customer service automation and healthcare documentation to sales workflows and project management, creating new possibilities for businesses to automate processes that previously required human oversight.

11.AI: BEYOND “HEY ASSISTANT”

11.ai represents ElevenLabs' vision for what voice assistants should become: intelligent agents that connect directly to your work tools through the Model Context Protocol.

Instead of providing generic responses, 11.ai can research prospects using Perplexity, create tickets in Linear, summarize yesterday's Slack messages in your engineering channel, and add priority tasks to your project management system.

The assistant runs on ElevenLabs' Conversational AI platform, featuring ultra-low latency for real-time interaction and access to over 5,000 voices or custom voice cloning that sounds exactly like you.

The magic happens through MCP integrations that give 11.ai secure access to your essential business tools.

Tell it to "plan my day and add priority tasks to Linear," and it will analyze your calendar, identify key objectives, and automatically populate your task list.

Ask it to "use Perplexity to research our prospect meeting today and summarize their recent funding," and it will gather relevant information from multiple sources while you prepare for other meetings.

This context-aware automation transforms voice interaction from simple commands into productive workflows that actually save time and reduce the mental overhead of switching between applications.

MY (FUN) EXPERIMENTS WITH 11 AI

You can get started by signing up at 11.ai with your email address. The setup process lets you customize your assistant by choosing a name and selecting a voice from ElevenLabs' library of over 5,000 options, or you can create a custom voice clone that sounds exactly like you.

Now, you can add the first integration to your assistant.

Tasks with Google Calendar MCP Integration

We chose Google Calendar.

Task 1: What meetings do I have in the coming week?

Task 2: Create a meeting and add participants

If you note the new meeting created does not have a bridge. Eleven AI does not have the capability to add a meeting link to a calendar event, yet.

Tasks with Notion

Task 1: Create a new document on Notion

First prompt: Can you create a new Notion document with an onboarding checklist for our first Sales Development Representative? We're a 5-year-old B2B SaaS company that provides workflow automation solutions to financial organizations across North America.

Here’s the checklist that 11.ai created.

Tasks with Perplexity

Task 1: List the Top 10 competitors of ElevenLabs

I also asked the voice assistant to record the findings in a new Notion document. This shows that 11.ai can execute workflows that combine two or more integrated applications in a single voice command.

How is this different from Perplexity Digital Voice Assistant?

Through 11.ai, you can only use the search functionality of Perplexity. However, the Perplexity digital assistant is much more sophisticated. It can play you a song, make reservations, send an email, and has multimodal search capabilities along with answering queries and setting reminders. 

Early Alpha Insights

1. 11.ai offers three approval modes: fully autonomous (no approval needed), manual approval for all actions, or hybrid mode, where you can set specific tasks to run automatically while others require your confirmation. However, these approvals require manual intervention by the user. We would have preferred if these approvals were voice-enabled so that the user could go completely hands-free.

2. The voice assistant maintains conversation context across sessions, so you can pick up where you left off without repeating information. However, it prompts you for new tasks every 10 seconds, which can become intrusive during focused work periods.

3. We didn’t find any transcripts of the conversations that we had with the voice assistant. Platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini, among others, currently support this feature.

4. There are only a few default integrations; we would have loved for more apps to be integrated with it, such as Reddit Search, Spotify, or your file system. However, it’s an alpha release, so we look forward to more integrations in future product upgrades.

END NOTE

That's all from us for this week.

Voice AI represents a fundamental shift in how we interact with technology, moving from click-based interfaces to natural conversations that trigger real actions. When typing feels slow and switching between apps becomes tedious, voice offers a more intuitive path to productivity. 11.ai demonstrates what becomes possible when AI agents can see across your tools and understand context without requiring you to repeatedly explain your workflow.

Hope you will enjoy playing around with 11.ai as much as we did. We'd love your feedback as you experiment with the voice assistant:

• Which integrations would be most valuable for your workflow?

• What additional MCP servers should be supported natively?

• How does voice interaction feel compared to traditional interfaces?

• What capabilities would make 11.ai essential for your daily routine?

Three 11.ai experiments to try this weekend:

1. Morning planning automation: Ask 11.ai to "review my calendar and create priority tasks in Linear based on today's meetings." Watch it organize your day without switching apps.

2. Research and documentation: Say, "Research our biggest competitor using Perplexity and create a summary document in Notion." See how it gathers insights and structures information autonomously.

3. Team communication catch-up: Try "summarize yesterday's engineering Slack messages and create follow-up tasks for any action items." Experience hands-free workflow management.

To set your mind at ease, 11.ai includes enterprise-grade security with HIPAA compliance, permission-based access controls, and encrypted data transmission. Each MCP integration operates within the defined boundaries you set, ensuring your AI assistant accesses only the information and actions you've authorized.

So, which voice-first workflow will you automate first?
Maybe “Eleven“ can finally start attending those 9 AM stand-ups while you hit snooze for the third time.