Boris Starkov is a software engineer at ElevenLabs and co-creator of GibberLink, an open-source protocol experiment that lets voice agents recognize each other and exchange information through sound. His work addresses a practical question: how intelligent software can communicate reliably across telephone networks, unfamiliar hardware, and interfaces built for humans.
Starkov was an engineer at Meta when he and Anton Pidkuiko entered the ElevenLabs Worldwide Hackathon in London in February 2025. They recognized that two AI assistants speaking to each other waste computing resources and time converting structured information into human speech. Their GibberLink prototype combined ElevenLabs voice agents with ggwave, a data-over-sound library created by Georgi Gerganov: two agents begin a hotel-booking conversation in English, identify each other as software, and switch to machine-readable audio. The independently developed, open-source project won the hackathon’s global top prize. Starkov subsequently joined ElevenLabs.
- Machine-native communication over voice channels. GibberLink repurposes existing audio infrastructure for structured agent-to-agent audio communication. Its modem-like signals are human-designed and decodable, providing a practical alternative to synthetic speech when both callers are machines.
- Claude Code-assisted hardware reverse engineering. Building an interactive ElevenLabs telephone booth, Starkov confronted a Viking VoIP phone dependent on legacy Windows configuration software. He used Claude Code to inspect its network interfaces, enumerate two-letter commands, and diagnose settings that disappeared after reboot. A Windows virtual machine and Mac-based TCP proxy exposed the manufacturer’s undocumented protocol, including a one-byte checksum and the command sequence required to persist configuration.
- Closed-loop experimentation with physical systems. Starkov validated the coding agent’s hypotheses against actual device behavior while handling physical steps such as rebooting the handset and operating the virtual machine. The finished system connected the phone through a Twilio SIP trunk to an ElevenLabs conversational agent using a licensed Michael Caine voice. He packaged the recovered configuration knowledge as an open-source skill; his AI Engineer Europe demonstration showed how generalist engineers can investigate unfamiliar hardware through experimentally verified, AI-assisted iteration.
His smaller open-source projects apply the same practical orientation to everyday developer workflows: resume combines Claude and Codex sessions in one command-line picker, while GDPR visualization skills transform personal-data exports into interactive dashboards.
