Updated 15 November 2026
On Saturday evening in Noida, a room of developers, students and founders went from zero to a working AI receptionist in two hours: they gave a startup its own voice with ElevenLabs, turned that voice into a talking agent with ElevenAgents, and put it live on a web page. The session was Airtribe’s Ship Your First Voice AI Agent – Noida Edition, held on 14 November 2026 at DevX in Sector 125, and it was led by Tushar Madaan.
Key points
- Hands-on workshop, 4 pm to 6 pm, 14 November 2026, at DevX, Sector 125, Noida
- Trainer: Tushar, who also led Airtribe’s Codex workshop in October
- Part 1: create a brand voice, speech and sound effects with ElevenLabs
- Part 2: build a receptionist agent in eight steps with ElevenAgents, then embed it on a website
- Everything ran in the browser on free accounts; no coding was needed
Ears, brain and mouth
The session opened with a simple picture of how a voice agent works. A caller asks, “Are you open on Sunday?” The agent’s ears (speech-to-text) turn the words into text. Its brain (a large language model) decides what to say or do. Its mouth (text-to-speech) speaks the reply: “Yes, 10 AM to 4 PM!” Then it waits, listens again, and stops talking if the caller interrupts. Part 1 of the workshop built the mouth. Part 2 built the whole agent.
Participants needed only a laptop with Chrome, earphones with a mic, a free ElevenLabs account and a one-line startup idea: what you do, for whom, and the price.
Part 1: giving a startup its own voice with ElevenLabs
In the first 25 minutes, everyone worked inside ElevenLabs, the AI voice platform. The tasks were short and practical:
- Text to speech: paste a short sales script for your own startup (“Hi, I’m Riya from…”) and hear it read out in a lifelike voice.
- Voice Design: describe a voice in plain words, such as a warm, friendly Indian woman in her late 20s who sounds like a helpful receptionist, and let the tool create it. That voice, named Riya, was saved for Part 2.
- Sound effects: type a prompt like “a phone ringing twice in a quiet modern office” and get clips back in seconds.
Tushar also walked the room through the free plan’s limits, such as monthly credits and the cost of designing a voice, so nobody ran out before the main build.
Part 2: a receptionist agent in eight steps with ElevenAgents
The second, 60-minute part used ElevenAgents, ElevenLabs’ platform for conversational voice agents. Each participant built a front-desk receptionist for their own startup, step by step, checking a box on each slide before moving on:
| Step | What participants did |
|---|---|
| 1. Create | Started from a Front Desk Receptionist template |
| 2. Brain | Wrote a system prompt: short answers, use only facts from the knowledge base, take a name and number if unsure |
| 3. Voice | Switched the agent to the Riya voice from Part 1, with Hindi as an extra language |
| 4. Knowledge | Added a startup FAQ: what it does, price, hours, location, refunds |
| 5. Test | Called the agent in the browser, asked questions, interrupted it, and asked things not in the FAQ |
| 6. Leads | Set it to collect the caller’s name, number and interest, and score whether a lead was captured |
| 7. Tools | Turned on tools to end calls politely and switch to Hindi when a caller speaks Hindi |
| 8. Ship | Published the agent and pasted its widget code into a simple web page with a “Start a call” button |
The session ended with a live demo of an agent talking through a speaker, and a question for the room: what will you use it for? Use cases discussed included receptionists, sales assistants, support lines, restaurant and kirana orders, spoken English or Hindi tutors and mock interview coaches.
From a browser to a real Indian phone number
An agent on a web page is a start; an agent that answers a phone call is a business tool. One “level up” covered exactly that. Using VoiceLink, which provides TRAI-compliant Indian numbers that work with ElevenLabs and more than 40 other platforms over SIP or WebSocket, participants saw how a number can be linked to the agent through ElevenLabs’ telephony settings so it answers real calls from any phone. A slide put the reason in one line: “International Numbers Scaring Your Customers?” People in India often ignore calls from unfamiliar foreign numbers, so a local number can decide whether a call is answered at all.
A track for developers, and three rules before going live
For those who code, the deck included a developer track: creating an ElevenLabs API key safely and keeping it out of Git, generating speech from a Python script, putting the agent inside a React app, managing agents as code with the ElevenLabs command-line tool, and giving the agent a real action through a webhook, such as checking available appointment slots. There was also a bonus: building an agent just by speaking to ElevenAgents’ Architect.
The workshop closed with three rules for anyone putting a voice agent in front of real customers:
- Say it’s an AI. Tell callers they are talking to an AI agent.
- Protect callers. Never ask for passwords, OTPs or card numbers.
- Offer a human. Always give callers a way to reach a person.
About the trainer
Tushar Madaan is a Delhi-based technologist who started out as a developer and now builds products and trains teams. In October he led Airtribe’s Codex workshop in Noida, where participants built AI agents without needing to code. You can read our report on that session: Inside the Codex workshop in Noida. This time, the focus moved from agents that type to agents that talk.
Why voice agents matter for Indian businesses
India prefers to call. Many customers would rather speak than fill a form or type in English, and voice lets businesses serve people in Hindi and other Indian languages. Clinics, coaching centres, brokers and local shops handle huge call volumes. A voice agent can answer routine questions at any hour, take bookings and leads, and pass harder calls to a human. The catch is quality: an agent that mishears, pauses too long or calls from a strange number can lose a customer faster than a busy phone line.
Frequently asked questions
What tools were used in the workshop?
ElevenLabs for voices, speech and sound effects, and ElevenAgents for building the voice agent. VoiceLink was shown for connecting the agent to an Indian phone number.
Do you need to know coding to build a voice agent?
No. The main build ran entirely in the browser. An optional developer track covered Python, React and the ElevenLabs command-line tool.
Can you build one on a free account?
Yes, for testing. The free plan covered the workshop, but using an agent with real customers needs a paid plan.
Questions to think about
- Would you be comfortable if a business you call is answered by an AI voice agent?
- Should AI callers have to say clearly that they are not human?
- Which Indian language should voice agents get right first?
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