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How to talk to statues — Joe Reeve, ElevenLabs
Takeaway
Existing voice and research APIs make prototypes easy; trustworthy cultural experiences depend on curated content.
Summary
- A statue app turns a photograph into historical research, a designed voice, and an ElevenLabs conversational agent in about 30 seconds.
- The prototype combines OpenAI research with ElevenLabs voice-design and agent APIs and was built in Cursor in roughly two hours.
- Viral interest brought inquiries from museums and art businesses, illustrating demand for conversational cultural experiences.
- Production museum experiences need curator-designed narratives and trusted collection data instead of relying solely on ad hoc web research.
elevenlabsvoice-agentsmuseums
Original description
A museum CEO tracked down his WhatsApp number and called. "I've had a team of 10 people working on this for a year. How did you build this?" Joe from ElevenLabs built the statue app in two hours on a Sunday using Cursor and a single one shot prompt. He posted it on a Tuesday and got 50,000 impressions. Reposted the next day about vibe coding and hit 1.5 million. The pipeline: point your phone at a statue, OpenAI deep research identifies it and generates historical context and a voice description, the ElevenLabs voice design API creates a matching voice from that description, an agent spins up, and a conversation starts. The whole thing runs in about 30 seconds. Museums, auction houses, and travel platforms all reached out wanting the same thing built for their collections. Speaker info: https://x.com/isnit0 https://x.com/isnit0/status/202410471... https://elevenlabs.io/blog/talk-to-a-...