Some people would rather talk to an agent than type to it: a technician with gloves on, a retailer driving between stores, a caller who would rather speak Hindi than type it. Cruq is in the ElevenLabs Grants program, and it is paying for much of the work to make that real.
What the grant provides
ElevenLabs gives startups in the program:
- 33 million characters of usage over 12 months, which ElevenLabs puts at more than 680 hours of agent conversations.
- Access to the full platform: speech-to-text, text-to-speech, voice design and cloning, and agents.
The program is for small companies with a paid product. You can read the terms and apply on the ElevenLabs Grants page.
What we are building with it
Voice in hosted apps. An app built on Cruq can now take speech. The person presses the mic, ElevenLabs Scribe turns it into text, and the words land in the message box so they can check them before sending. Each reply has a button to hear it read aloud.
Mixed Hindi and English. In India, people often switch languages mid-sentence, so our voice work is tested in Hinglish from the start. In our first test, we had ElevenLabs read out "Your order for the Sauce Labs Backpack has shipped, aur kal tak pahunch jayega", then transcribed the audio back. Scribe returned every word correctly, with the Hindi in Devanagari and the English in Latin script.
What comes next. Voice notes on WhatsApp, which is how many people in India and the UAE already message, and phone agents that answer calls.
Most of the grant goes on building and testing these: running the same sentences through different voices and models, checking accents, and measuring how long a reply takes to start playing.
Customers bring their own key
The grant covers Cruq's own work. It does not pay for customers' usage, and the program does not allow reselling characters. That matches how Cruq already works with every model provider: a workspace connects its own ElevenLabs key in Integrations, turns on voice for an app, and pays ElevenLabs directly for what it uses. Its data and its bill stay with it.
Why it matters
Getting voice right takes many hours of audio, most of it spent on tests that never ship. The grant pays for those hours, so voice can be good by the time a customer turns it on.
