What's great
Best text-to-speech for production use.
The voice quality is unmatched—natural, expressive, and convincing. That said, it's not perfect yet: voice tone consistency across multiple calls/sessions can vary. You might notice subtle differences in the same voice between sessions, which matters if you're building customer-facing applications that need predictable behavior.
Bottom line: Despite the consistency quirk, ElevenLabs is still the gold standard. No other TTS provider comes close to this level of quality.
What needs improvement
Voice tone consistency across sessions—even with stability parameters configured correctly. The same voice can still have subtle variations in energy, pacing, or emotional tone between calls. For customer-facing applications, this inconsistency is noticeable.
vs Alternatives
Cartesia SonicIt's the only proven, production-ready TTS solution. Voice quality is unmatched—natural, expressive, and reasonably stable performance.
Cartesia Sonic-3 is a promising alternative worth watching.
If you're shipping to real users, Elevenlabs is the choice.
Does the ASR produce accurate timestamps and diarization?
Excellent on both fronts:
Timestamps: Word-level precision. Each word gets an exact timestamp, making it perfect for subtitles, searchable transcripts, or syncing text with audio.
Diarization: Industry-leading. Scribe can identify and label up to 32 different speakers in a single audio file—crucial for meetings, interviews, or multi-participant calls.
Bonus feature: Audio event tagging. It also detects non-verbal sounds like laughter, applause, and background noise, adding context markers directly into the transcript.
One limitation: Out-of-the-box diarization works best on shorter files (under 8 minutes originally), though workarounds exist for longer recordings.
For production voice applications, the combination of accurate timestamps and reliable speaker identification is a major advantage.
Is the voice library broad and diverse enough?
Yes, and with a key advantage: custom voice cloning.
ElevenLabs offers a large library of pre-built voices covering various accents, ages, and styles. But the real differentiator is custom voice cloning—you can create brand-specific voices that are uniquely yours.
This combination gives you flexibility: use their library for quick deployment, or invest in custom voices for brand consistency and differentiation.
How predictable are costs at scale and per minute?
Two challenges with pricing:
1. Higher costs than competitors - ElevenLabs is premium-priced compared to other TTS providers. You're paying for the quality, but the cost difference is significant at scale.
2. Low concurrency limits - This is the bigger issue for production use. The concurrent request limits are restrictive, especially if you're running a customer-facing application with variable traffic. You'll hit limits faster than with other providers, which can bottleneck your product.
Trade-off: You get the best voice quality on the market, but you'll need to budget accordingly and plan around concurrency constraints.