Over St. Patrick’s Day weekend, an AI voice agent named Rachel called more than 3,000 pubs across Ireland with a single question: “How much is a pint of Guinness?” Over 2,052 pubs answered, more than 1,000 prices were verified, and almost nobody realised they were talking to a machine.
With a warm Northern Irish accent, Rachel the AI voice agent gathered the data that created the Guinndex, the first island-wide live dataset of Guinness pint prices in 14 years.
The national average came in at €5.95, with €5.50 being the most common price.
For anyone working in marketing or consumer behaviour, this project feels like a lightbulb moment. It is not just a gimmick. It shows how quickly you can fill a real data gap with affordable AI tools.
AI Meets Guinness
The man behind it all is Matt Cortland, an American AI engineer now based in London.
“I’m a former pub and bar owner, so I know what it’s like to be on the other end of customer pricing calls,” said Cortland. “But I also know what it’s like to be on the consumer end and paying a kidney for a pint. I apologise to everyone I tortured over Paddy’s weekend. Rachel just wanted a wee drink.”
Ireland’s Central Statistics Office stopped publishing pint prices back in 2011, when the average sat at €3.93. Fast forward 14 years and the Guinndex reveals a 48 percent jump to €5.95.
The site itself is designed to keep evolving, with an interactive map, county breakdowns, search by town or pub name, and a simple “contribute” button so pub goers can add fresh prices, photos or corrections.
Cortland built the whole thing on a shoestring, around €200 plus his own time.
He used Google Places API to discover and map more than 5,200 pubs across all 32 counties. Then came the challenge: turning a script into a believable phone caller.
For the voice, he turned to ElevenLabs, the London-based company that has rapidly become a trailblazing presence in AI audio development.
ElevenLabs: The Company Revolutionising AI Audio
Founded in 2022 by Polish entrepreneurs Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, ElevenLabs set out to solve a simple frustration: synthetic voices that sounded robotic and unnatural.
Today the company powers everything from audiobooks and podcasts to video dubbing, virtual assistants, and real-time conversational agents.
What makes ElevenLabs stand out is the naturalness of its voices.
Using advanced deep learning models, the platform captures subtle nuances like emotion, intonation, pacing, and breathing patterns that make synthetic speech feel genuinely human. It supports thousands of voices across more than 70 languages and countless regional accents, including highly convincing Irish ones.
In early 2026, ElevenLabs raised $500 million in a Series D round led by Sequoia Capital at an $11 billion valuation, more than tripling its value from the previous year. The company ended 2025 with over $330 million in annual recurring revenue and shows no signs of slowing down.
For the Guinndex, ElevenLabs let Cortland create Rachel with a warm Northern Irish accent inspired by Rachel Duffy from the TV show The Traitors. He spent time refining tone, warmth and pacing until she sounded like someone you would happily chat with over a pint, not a stiff robot.
The goal was simple: make her feel real.
Early scripts that asked for confirmation gave people too much time to get suspicious, so Cortland stripped it right back. Ask the question, say thanks, and end the call cleanly.
To actually place the calls, he paired ElevenLabs with Twilio, which handled the telephony routing over an old Irish SIM card. Anthropic’s Claude then stepped in to read the transcripts and pull out the prices accurately. The two platforms worked together seamlessly, letting Rachel ring thousands of numbers without anyone needing to sit by a phone manually dialling.
From Free Drinks to Price Drops
One bartender in Kilkenny offered to buy Rachel a drink if she could not afford one. In Northern Ireland, a price mysteriously dropped once she mentioned she was coming in. There was even a moment when Rachel reached an automated system at a Premier Inn and two AIs ended up talking in circles with no result.
For marketers and platform builders, the Guinndex is a perfect case study in what comes next.
Combine voice AI, simple APIs and a bit of crowdsourcing, and you can turn analogue markets into live, transparent datasets. Whether you are tracking coffee prices, taxi fares or gig tickets, the same pattern applies. Rachel did not replace the person behind the bar. She just asked the question that customers were already wondering.
Author: Ruben McCarthy
