If you have ever been amazed to hear a synthetic voice that seems to breathe, hesitate and get excited like us, it is very likely that you are looking at the work of Piotr Dabkowski.
Born in Gdańsk (Poland) around 1995, Piotr is not only an engineering prodigy; He is a visionary who has managed to humanize the interaction between machines and people. **
His story is that of an insatiable curiosity that began at the prestigious Copernicus Institute in Warsaw, where he met his inseparable partner Mati Staniszewski, and that took him to the classrooms of Oxford and Cambridge, where his thesis on image detection by AI ended up shining at the prestigious NeurIPS conference.
From Google laboratories to the dream of ElevenLabs
Before revolutionizing the market on his own, Piotr honed his talent as a machine learning engineer at Google between 2018 and 2022. However, his true motivation was born from a very everyday and somewhat frustrating experience: the Polish dubbing of his childhood, where a single narrator (the “lektor”) read all the dialogues without a trace of emotion.
Piotr was convinced that technology could do better. This is how ElevenLabs was born in 2022, with the mission of eliminating language and sound barriers.
As CTO, he has led the development of models that not only clone voices in more than 29 languages with astonishing accuracy, but do so with minimal latency, enabling real-time applications that once seemed like science fiction.
A 2026 marked by innovation and social purpose
Dabkowski’s career has recently reached new heights. Earlier this year, the company launched Scribe v2, a transcription system that has set new standards for accuracy in the industry, and surprised the world with “The Eleven Album,” exploring the frontiers of generative music.
But what really defines Piotr is his ethical approach. He has promoted social impact programs to give voice back to people with degenerative diseases, demonstrating that his work goes far beyond the code.
When delving into the biographies of the protagonists of artificial intelligence, the figure of Piotr stands out for his simplicity. Despite his multimillion-dollar success and being a constant presence on the TIME100 AI list, he prefers the silence of his laboratory to the spotlight.
For him, success is not creating a powerful tool, but making technology disappear so that only the warmth of an authentic conversation remains.
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