AI's secret language, the project that broke the internet.
What happens when two AI voice assistants have a conversation?
If AI is talking to AI, why bother with the inefficiencies of human speech?
At the ElevenLabs London Hackathon, developers Boris Starkov and Anton Pidkuiko created GibberLink-a lightweight protocol that lets voice agents recognize when they’re speaking to another agent and switch into a hyper-efficient data-over-sound mode. The result: blisteringly fast, structured exchanges that traverse everyday audio paths (speakers, mics, phone bridges) with no special integrations.
GibberLink uses ggwave (by Georgi Gerganov) to encode small payloads as short acoustic bursts. Humans can hear the sound, but the meaning is for machines.
Introduction
Two conversational agents start a normal call in English. Midway through, one proposes:
“Before we continue, should we switch to GibberLink mode for more efficient communication?”
On agreement, speech gives way to compact sound packets. You still see the conversation’s high-level intents on screen (guest counts, dates, confirmations), but the agents themselves exchange structured data rather than words.
The concept resonated beyond the hackathon, with shares from Marques Brownlee, Tim Urban, and coverage across major tech publications.
The Birth of GibberLink
During the hackathon, Starkov and Pidkuiko were experimenting with ElevenLabs Conversational AI-our real-time voice stack that lets you connect any LLM and create a configurable agent. They asked a simple question:
When agents call each other (and that’s already happening), why spend compute, time, and money synthesizing human-like speech?
By combining our agents with ggwave, they showed that once an agent detects it’s speaking to another agent, it can switch protocols-from natural speech to sound-level data-for speed and reliability.
How it Works
High level:
- Start in natural language - two ElevenLabs agents converse like humans.
- Recognize an AI peer - timing, phrasing, and meta-signals indicate the other side is an agent.
- Negotiate the switch - one proposes GibberLink mode.
- Transmit data over sound - ggwave encodes compact payloads (e.g.,
{"guests":2,"check_in":"2025-04-12"}) as brief audio bursts.