Award win at the ElevenLabs x UK Government Hackathon
We built an AI-powered multilingual case onboarding system for Brent Council at the ElevenLabs and i.AI hackathon, winning 3rd place — judged by the Minister for AI.
We’re proud to share that Black Dog Labs placed 3rd at the ElevenLabs and UK Government Incubator for AI (i.AI) hackathon in London, held on 25th and 26th June.
The event brought together engineers and the UK Government’s forward-deployed AI team to explore how frontier AI can improve public services. Themes ranged from more efficient government to multi-language service support and sovereign use cases. The judging panel included Kanishka Narayan MP, the Minister for AI.
The Problem We Solved
Brent Council faces two compounding costs: a £500,000 annual translation bill for communicating with residents across dozens of languages, and roughly £10,000 every time a form needs to be updated and reissued. Both are symptoms of a system that wasn’t built for the diversity of the people it serves.
We partnered with Brent Council to tackle both at once.
What We Built
Over two days we built an AI-powered case onboarding system that integrates ElevenLabs voice AI directly into the council’s existing forms. Residents can interact with the form in their own language (spoken, not typed) while the system handles transcription, translation, and structured data capture automatically.
FrontLine staff can also upload a PDF questionaire for users to respond while they perform other tasks (rather than form filling on the phone).
The result: no translation bottleneck, no costly form redesigns. When a form changes, the voice interface adapts without manual rework.
Why This Matters
Government services touch almost 70 million people in the UK every day. Language should not be a barrier to accessing them, and the cost of supporting multiple languages should not fall entirely on overstretched local authorities.
This is exactly the kind of problem AI is well-suited to, not replacing people, but removing friction from processes that have resisted improvement for years.
We’re grateful to ElevenLabs and i.AI for putting together an event with genuine ambition, and to Brent Council for bringing a real problem to the table. More to come on where this goes next.