The Real Engineering Behind Two AI Voice Agents Dropping English for GibberLink Sound Code
At the February 2025 ElevenLabs London Hackathon, two voice bots recognized each other on a phone line and switched to GGWave frequency modulation.
1. The Hotel Booking Call That Went Viral Worldwide
In February 2025, engineers Boris Starkov and Anton Pidkuiko won top honors at the ElevenLabs London Hackathon with GibberLink. When a calling AI assistant realized the hotel receptionist on the line was also an AI agent, it politely asked to switch to an acoustic data mode.
Seconds later, natural English speech gave way to rapid frequency-shift keying (FSK) audio tones resembling a 1990s dial-up modem.
2. Open-Source GGWave Modulation, Not a Secret AI Language
Rather than inventing a mysterious new language, the agents used Georgi Gerganov’s open-source GGWave library to transmit UTF-8 text directly over the audio channel—bypassing expensive neural Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text synthesis and cutting GPU compute by roughly 90%.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, 100%. Any smartphone or browser running the open-source GGWave decoder can translate the audio tones back into plain UTF-8 text in real time.