ElevenLabs is a groundbreaking AI-powered text-to-speech (TTS) platform that makes it easy to generate authentic-sounding human voices in almost any language.
ElevenLabs’ generative AI features stand out for their remarkable naturalness and realism, including intonation, speed, inflection, and emotions. This puts the platform’s capabilities beyond traditional text-to-speech systems.
This post explores ElevenLabs’ different features and how they can help with your content creation and other business needs.
What Does ElevenLabs Do?
In simple terms, ElevenLabs is a generative AI platform for human voices. It offers its users the ability to generate truly lifelike voices in 29 languages and with distinct vocal characteristics. It has arguably the most popular AI voices like the Adam voice which is very popular in Tiktok, YouTube, and Instagram videos.
ElevenLabs differs from other text-to-speech platforms because of its focus on the naturalness and flexibility of voices, which gives its generated outputs a much better quality.
Furthermore, ElevenLabs allows you to clone your own voice and use it as a generative AI voice in any language of your choice. Finally, it can also dub videos with ease, by automatically changing the audio from one language to another.
In general, ElevenLabs enables content creators to quickly generate all types of audio content in the languages and styles of their choice. These can range from marketing materials to games, audiobooks, and different applications.
ElevenLabs Features
To better understand what ElevenLabs can do for your business, it’s necessary to take a closer look at each of its many features one after the other. So, here they are.
- Advanced Text-to-speech: You can turn text from 29 languages into spoken sound with a top-quality naturalness that includes contextual awareness and precision tuning options that enable you to tweak and optimize any voice to your needs. It works for both short- and long-form audio projects.
- High-quality Output: ElevenLabs generates high-quality audio outputs for all accounts, although your sampling rate depends on your plan. Still, Free plan users get impressive 128 kbps MP3 audio, while Creator plan users get up to 192 kbps, and Independent Publisher plan users get full 44.1 kHz PCM audio (CD quality) output through the API.
- Lifelike Output: ElevenLabs includes contextual awareness that recognizes nuances to generate voice with very human intonation and emotional expression. In addition to a variety of voices, you can further fine-tune each voice for stability or variety, clarity of expression, and individual style exaggeration.
- 29 languages & 100+ Accents: The platform supports 29 languages in over 100 accents, enabling you to tailor your output to achieve the right engagement. The supported languages include English, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, Portuguese, German, Japanese, Danish, Croatian, Tamil, and others.
- AI Dubbing: This feature takes any audio or video file as input and returns a similar file with automatically translated voices from the source to the target languages that you specified. It uses AI to detect speakers and their languages and can handle multiple speakers at once, as well as preserve their voice styles in the new dub. This feature works with YouTube, TikTok, X (Twitter), Vimeo, and others.
- Voice Design & Voice Cloning: ElevenLabs offers two methods of making your own unique voice. The first is Voice Design, which lets you customize a speaker’s identity through available parameters to generate a unique voice. The second method is Voice Cloning, which allows you to mimic a natural voice by recording and uploading a sample. You can record your voice cloning audio in one language and use it to generate outputs in all other languages.
- Projects: To generate long-form audio, such as audiobooks and streaming content, ElevenLabs offers the Projects tool. With it, you can create a long-form audio project, including pauses, multiple languages, multiple voices, and fragments that you can generate independently. It allows you to upload .pdf, .txt, and .epub files, as well as from URL addresses. Plus, you can always save your work to continue later.
- Quick Online Tool: ElevenLabs offers you a quick online tool to test the quality of its generative AI capabilities. The tool is available on its homepage and here. You can click on any of the language buttons to produce some sample text in the entry box, which you can also further edit. Next, select one of the many available voices and click on the play button to hear your TTS output. A download option is also available. This tool is limited to 333 characters and works without a registered account.
- Community Library: You can also tap into the ElevenLabs community to discover voices created by other users, as well as to learn and share. The community library includes unique voices that have been crafted using ElevenLabs’ Voice Design tool. You can filter them by gender, age, and accent to quickly find a suitable profile for your next project.
- API: ElevenLabs also offers API access for developers to quickly give their AI agents, websites, apps, chatbots, and LLMs a befitting voice. The API is fast with less than 500 ms of latency, and delivers audio at 128 kbps, with emotional variety and contextual awareness to fit different situations. It works with Python and React, as well as gaming engines like Unity and Unreal.
Top Uses For ElevenLabs
Generative AI systems such as ElevenLabs are opening the way for lots of applications in different industries and for different uses. Here are some of the ways that businesses are putting ElevenLabs to good use.
- Videos: From documentaries to marketing videos and bringing fictional characters to life with a natural voice, ElevenLabs offers many opportunities to video content creators.
- Gaming: NPC or Non-Player Characters are increasingly gaining in usage and popularity. Game makers can create amazing NPC dialogues and real-time narrations to help immerse their players into unforgettable gaming experiences.
- Audiobook: ElevenLabs makes it easy to convert long-form content to engaging audio. The platform offers everything you need to bring your stories to life by helping you create an audiobook with the right natural voice and tone.
- Chatbots: Most chatbots deal with written text, but adding a TTS layer like ElevenLabs can quickly transform any text-based chatbot into a speaking robot.
- AI Assistants: The same goes for AI assistants. ElevenLabs makes it possible to generate the exact type of voice that you want from an assistant, which is much better than the monotonous, machine-like output that most users are used to.
- Multi-lingual Videos: Making a video in many languages has never been easier with ElevenLabs. Subtitles are great but they take some of the viewing pleasure away and using foreign language actors to create audio dubs can be costly. But ElevenLabs lets you do it with ease.
Pros & Cons
There are many pros and cons to choosing ElevenLabs over the competition like Murf AI and Speechify. Here are some of those reasons.
Pros
- Life-like audio without the monotony of standard computer-generated voices
- Intuitive and user-friendly interface
- Flexible plans with competitive pricing
- Wide range of possible applications and uses
Cons
- Its many features and settings can be intimidating at first
Pricing & Plans
ElevenLabs is available in six plans. They are the Free, Starter, Creator, Independent Publisher, Growing Business, and Enterprise plans. Each plan comes with its pros and cons, so it’s up to you to choose what suits you.
Following is a closer look at each of these plans and what they offer.
- Free: Costs $0 and includes non-commercial speech synthesis for up to 10k characters per month. It allows the creation of up to 3 voices, can access the voice library, works in all 29 languages, outputs 128 kbps Mp3, and allows 2k characters of dubbing per month.
- Starter: Costs $5 per month and contains everything in the Free plan, but with up to 30k characters of TTS per month, up to 10 custom voices, access to voice cloning, and it includes a commercial license.
- Creator: This plan costs $22 per month and includes everything in Starter, but it comes with 100k characters per month, professional voice cloning, up to 30 custom voices, and 192 kbps Mp3 output via API. Additional usage-based characters with this plan cost $0.30 per 1,000 characters.
- Independent Publisher: Costing $99 per month, this plan includes everything in Creator, but includes 500k characters per month, up to 160 custom voices, a usage analytics dashboard, and 44.1 kHz PCM outputs via API. Additional usage-based characters cost $0.24 per 1,000 characters.
- Growing Business: This plan costs $330 per month for 2 million characters per month and up to 660 custom voices. Additional usage-based characters cost $0.18 per 1,000 characters.
- Enterprise: This one is tailored to the business needs and is reserved for companies with special needs, custom requests, high-volume, or priority services. Pricing is quote-based.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here are some frequently asked questions about the ElevenLabs text-to-speech generative AI platform.
Q: What makes ElevenLabs different from other TTS tools?
A: ElevenLabs differentiates itself from other Text-to-speech tools by generating naturally sounding voices that are more authentic than what standard tools generate.
Q: What audio formats does ElevenLabs support?
A: ElevenLabs delivers its generated audio data in MP3 or PCM files. Website users will receive speech synthesis MP3 files up to 128 kbps in quality and Project files up to 192 kbps. API users can also get Mp3 files, in addition to PCM files up to 44.1kHz quality.
Q: Does ElevenLabs integrate with other software?
A: ElevenLabs offers an API that lets anyone connect programmatically with the platform.
Q: Does ElevenLabs support other languages than English?
A: Yes, ElevenLabs supports 29 languages and 100+ accents, including German, French, Dutch, Turkish, and many more.
Q: Can I try ElevenLabs for free?
A: Yes, you can. ElevenLabs is a Freemium offer with a limited free plan that lets you try out its speech synthesis capabilities.
Conclusion
We have reached the end of our review of the ElevenLabs text-to-speech generative AI platform, and you have seen its many features, tools, capabilities, and pricing structure.
ElevenLabs makes it easy for content creators to accomplish a wide range of tasks, while producing high-quality, naturally human speech without the monotony of traditional robot speech synthesis.
The company offers a free account and free online tools too. So, if you are still undecided about ElevenLabs, then feel free to check them out here.
