ElevenLabs (elevenlabs.io) is the official platform of an AI voice research and product company, launched in public beta in January 2023. The problem it sets out to solve is making machines speak like people: type text and get speech with emotion, intonation, and natural pacing — and extend the same capability to voice cloning, cross-language dubbing, speech transcription, sound effects and music generation, and conversational voice agents that can answer phone calls. Its verifiable distinctions among voice tools: the flagship Eleven v3 model covers 70+ languages and supports inline audio tags such as [whispers] and [sighs] to control tone and non-verbal reactions (launch post); and the product line is explicitly split into ElevenCreative for creators, ElevenAgents for businesses, and ElevenAPI for developers (About page). As of 2026-09-16, the free tier provides 10,000 credits per month once you register.
At a glance
- URL: https://elevenlabs.io
- Type: AI speech synthesis and audio creation platform (web app + API)
- Cost: Free tier at 6/month, Creator 99/month; team plan Scale from $299/month; Enterprise custom pricing (as of 2026-09-16, official pricing)
- Sign-up: Browsing the site, docs, and pricing requires no account; generating content or calling the API requires one (Google sign-in supported). ElevenLabs' terms also cover content generated while signed out — publishing it still requires attribution (official guidance)
- Interface language: English (as of 2026-09-16 there is no official localized interface; generated speech itself supports Chinese and 70+ other languages)
- Mobile: a separate iOS/Android listening app, ElevenReader, reads articles, PDFs, and ePubs aloud (launched June 2024; see the Wikipedia entry)
Background
ElevenLabs was founded in 2022 by two Polish high-school friends: CEO Mati Staniszewski (previously at Palantir) and CTO Piotr Dąbkowski (previously at Google). The official press page says the two grew up amused by the "rough" dubbing of American movies in Poland and years later set out to build a platform that could break down language barriers in content; the "Eleven" in the name refers to November 11, Poland's National Independence Day (Wikipedia). The company is headquartered in London and New York.
Key funding and scale milestones:
- January 2023: public beta launch; registered users passed one million in the first half of that year (Wikipedia).
- January 2024: 1.1B valuation (Wikipedia).
- January 2025: 3.3B valuation (ibid.).
- February 4, 2026: 11B valuation, led by Sequoia Capital (Andrew Reed joining the board), bringing total funding to 330M in ARR.
On the customer side, ElevenLabs says Deutsche Telekom, Square, the Ukrainian Government, and Revolut use its voice agents; Duolingo, NVIDIA, and TIME use the creative platform; and Meta, Epic Games, Salesforce, and others reach over one billion users through its API (Series D announcement).
Speech synthesis: from text to emotional delivery
Models and languages
The official model documentation (as of 2026-09-16) organizes the speech models into several tiers:
- Eleven v3: the flagship, covering 70+ languages with multi-speaker dialogue generation and audio tags (insert
[whispers],[laughs], and similar markers into the text to steer tone and reactions). A single request is capped at 5,000 characters (roughly five minutes of audio). The launch notes caution that v3 needs more prompt engineering than earlier models and has higher latency, so it is not suited to real-time conversation. - Eleven v3 Conversational: a v3 variant for real-time dialogue, rated at about 280 ms latency.
- Multilingual v2: 29 languages, stable quality, suited to narration and long-form content.
- Flash v2.5: 32 languages at about 75 ms latency, aimed at real-time applications and large-scale batch generation at a lower API price.
Voice library, cloning, and voice design
If you don't want to clone a voice, you can pick one from the library: the documentation cites more than 10,000 voices (the Text to Speech page showed 11,000+ on 2026-09-16). There are three ways to get a voice of your own:
- Instant Voice Cloning (from Starter): clone from a short audio sample;
- Professional Voice Cloning (from Creator): train a higher-fidelity voice from more material — access requires passing a technical verification (safety page);
- Voice Design: describe a voice in text and "design" one that doesn't exist.
Dubbing, transcription, and studio tools
- AI Dubbing: launched October 2023, translating audio and video into other languages while preserving the original speaker's timbre and emotion as much as possible; it supported 20+ languages at launch (Wikipedia). From the Starter plan up, a Dubbing Studio allows line-by-line review.
- Speech to Text (Scribe): the first transcription model, released February 2025. ElevenLabs claims 99-language support with word-level timestamps, speaker diarization, and audio-event tags such as laughter, and reports a lower word error rate than Gemini 2.0 Flash and Whisper Large V3 on the FLEURS and Common Voice benchmarks (company claims; see the Scribe launch post). The current Scribe v2 family covers 90+ languages, with a real-time variant at about 150 ms latency and a HIPAA-eligible medical edition (model docs).
- Other audio tools: Voice Changer, Sound Effects (text-to-sound-effect generation), and Voice Isolator (background-noise removal).
- Studio: a project editor for long-form audio such as audiobooks — 3 projects on the free tier, 20 on Starter (pricing).
Music and other generative capabilities
Eleven Music, launched in August 2025, generates "studio-grade" music from natural-language prompts with control over genre, structure, and vocals. The company says it was developed in collaboration with labels, publishers, and artists and is cleared for commercial use across film, podcasts, advertising, and games (Wikipedia, model docs). On September 10, 2026, ElevenLabs announced a multi-year licensing and strategic agreement with Universal Music Group — its first deal with a major label — to build a fan-facing AI music creation platform on licensed catalogs (official announcement). The About and pricing pages also show ElevenCreative expanding into image and video generation, broadening the platform beyond voice into wider audiovisual creation.
Conversational agents and the developer platform
ElevenAgents lets businesses deploy voice and chat agents (customer support, sales, internal training) with a visual builder; an Expressive Mode based on v3, added in February 2026, brings faster responses and more natural delivery (Wikipedia). Reception AI is a ready-made AI phone receptionist for small and medium businesses (docs overview). ElevenAPI exposes the same capabilities over REST, with official Python and TypeScript SDKs, WebSocket streaming, and a command-line tool introduced in August 2026; concurrency limits scale with the subscription tier (model docs).
Accounts, credits, and commercial licensing
Everything is metered in credits: text to speech costs one credit per input character, while other products charge per second of processed audio. Credits reset monthly, and unused credits roll over for up to two months (docs overview). Per the pricing page as of 2026-09-16:
| Plan | Price (monthly) | Monthly credits | Key differences |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 10,000 | Core speech, transcription, sound effects, music; 3 Studio projects; no commercial license |
| Starter | $6 | 30,000 | Commercial license, Instant Voice Cloning, Dubbing Studio, 20 Studio projects |
| Creator | 11) | 121,000 | Professional Voice Cloning |
| Pro | $99 | 600,000 | 44.1 kHz PCM output via API, 192 kbps audio |
| Scale / Business | 990 | 1.8M / 6M | 3 / 10 workspace seats, more professional voice clones |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | DPA/SLAs, HIPAA BAAs, custom SSO, higher concurrency |
The licensing rules deserve close attention (official guidance): content generated on the free plan or while signed out cannot be used commercially, and publishing it requires attribution with "elevenlabs.io" or "11.ai" in the title (music content references "Eleven Music"). All paid plans include a commercial license, and content generated during a paid subscription remains commercially usable indefinitely. Output from Beta Services may not be used commercially or in production. A Startup Grants program offers selected startups 12 months free with 33 million characters.
Safety and content policy
The misuse potential of voice cloning is unavoidable for a platform like this. The official safety page describes four layers: prevention (pre-release red-teaming, sign-up vetting, blocking the cloning of celebrity and other high-risk voices, technical verification for Professional Voice Cloning), detection (AI classifiers plus human reviewers and a public reporting channel), enforcement (bans for violators, referrals to law enforcement for illegal activity), and transparency (C2PA provenance credentials on generated content, plus a public AI Speech Classifier that anyone can use to check whether an audio clip was made with ElevenLabs).
The company also concedes that "no safety system is perfect": within weeks of the early-2023 launch, users were generating fabricated celebrity statements with its tools, and audio experts linked the 2024 "Biden robocall" during the New Hampshire primary to audio made with ElevenLabs (Wikipedia).
Where it fits
- Narration and character voices for video, podcasts, and audiobooks — especially teams shipping multilingual versions;
- Creators and media localizing content into dozens of languages, with dubbing and transcription in one place;
- Character voices and real-time spoken dialogue for games and interactive content (the low-latency Flash v2.5 / v3 Conversational models);
- Developers embedding speech synthesis, transcription, or agents into their own products (API / SDK / CLI);
- Accessibility: the ElevenLabs Impact program provides free licenses to individuals with accessibility needs and to nonprofits, and in March 2026 the company pledged $1 billion in free voice-restoration technology for one million people living with permanent voice loss (Wikipedia).
Limitations
- The free tier is not for commercial use — the most common pitfall. Free or signed-out output must be attributed when published and cannot be used commercially; commercial use starts at the $6/month Starter plan.
- English-only interface: as of 2026-09-16, neither the web app nor the docs offer localized interfaces, so some English reading ability is required (generated speech itself supports Chinese).
- The credit model takes adjustment: credits reset monthly and roll over for at most two months; different models and products consume credits at different rates; long content must be split at per-request limits (5,000 characters for v3); heavy use quickly pushes you up the pricing ladder.
- v3 is harder to steer: the launch notes warn it needs more prompt engineering and runs at higher latency — for real-time scenarios, use Flash v2.5 or v3 Conversational instead.
- Closed-source SaaS: model weights are not available; everything runs through the web app and API, tying quality, availability, and cost to a single vendor.
- Misuse and compliance concerns: voice cloning inherently carries impersonation risk, and the platform has repeatedly been linked to deepfake incidents; before cloning someone else's voice for commercial use, verify the consent chain yourself.
Alternatives
Unlike Suno (also listed in this directory), which focuses on generating complete songs, ElevenLabs centers on speech, with music as one part of its creative platform. The hyperscalers' TTS services (Amazon Polly, Google Cloud Text-to-Speech, Azure Speech) are positioned more as infrastructure; within the voice-generation niche, PlayHT, Murf, and Speechify each target somewhat different scenarios.
References
- ElevenLabs About, Press, Safety (checked 2026-09-16)
- Pricing and the publishing/licensing guidance (checked 2026-09-16)
- Docs: Overview, Models (checked 2026-09-16)
- Official blog: Series D, Eleven v3, Meet Scribe, UMG agreement
- Wikipedia: ElevenLabs (checked 2026-09-16; used to cross-check early history and controversy events)
