Also in December: the ElevenLabs Worldwide Hackathon, hosted at NxtWave in Hyderabad, with a voice AI brief. We built what we called a Netflix of corporate training. You upload a PDF, and it comes back as a series of bite-sized video episodes, each narrated by an AI voice.
The pitch was simple. Training material mostly lives in long documents, and short episodes are easier to finish than a forty-page PDF. In a tool like this the voice is what people notice in a demo, but the harder problem comes before it: deciding where one episode ends and the next begins, and turning written prose into something that sounds right read aloud.
What the demo did not show
We showed that it worked. We did not show that it helped. Nobody measured whether someone who watched the episodes remembered more than someone who read the PDF, and that is the only question that matters for a training tool.
That gap, between a system that runs and a system that does what it claims, is the thing I ended up spending most of 2026 on.