ElevenLabs
AI & LLM · Freemium
Overview
An AI voice company. Its main product turns written text into natural sounding speech in many languages and voices. It was founded in 2022 by Piotr Dabkowski and Mati Staniszewski, former Google and Palantir staff. The tool is widely seen as one of the reasons synthetic speech stopped sounding obviously robotic. Beyond text to speech it now clones voices, dubs video into other languages, transcribes audio, generates sound effects and music, and builds voice agents that can hold a phone conversation. It runs in a web app and through an API, with a free tier and paid plans priced on a monthly pool of credits.
What people use it for
The most common use is voiceover: narration for YouTube videos, explainers, ads, and product demos without hiring a voice actor or booking a studio. Authors and publishers use it to produce audiobook narration. Course creators and app makers add spoken output to their products. Teams use voice cloning to keep one consistent narrator voice across a series, or to let a creator produce audio in their own voice without recording every line. The dubbing tool translates and revoices video into other languages while keeping timing close to the original. Support and sales teams build conversational voice agents that answer calls. Game and film studios use it for temporary scratch dialogue and sound effects. Podcasters use it to fix flubbed lines without re recording.
Key capabilities
Text to speech covers around 70 languages, and dubbing and speech to text cover more. Instant voice cloning builds a usable voice from about a minute of audio, and Professional Voice Cloning trains a higher quality voice from a longer, clean recording. The Dubbing tool and Dubbing API translate and revoice video, with an editor for fixing the transcript and timing. Other tools generate sound effects, music, and voice designs from a text description. Conversational AI lets you build voice agents that run over the phone or in an app. Everything is available through a documented API, and text to speech has low latency modes for real time use. Commercial rights are included from the lowest paid tier. Plans run from a free monthly credit allowance through Starter, Creator, Pro, Scale, Business, and Enterprise, with credits shared across all the tools and higher tiers unlocking Professional Voice Cloning and higher audio quality.
Limitations
The credit system is the main complaint. Credits are spent even on generations you throw away, and reviewers estimate real production cost runs well above the headline rate once you count regenerations for glitches and bad takes. Long form work at volume gets expensive, and picking a plan before understanding credits leads to surprise limits. Instant voice cloning is hit or miss and can sound fake even with plenty of samples, while the good results need a long, clean, professionally recorded source. Voice cloning also raises a consent problem, since a convincing clone needs very little audio. Competing tools have started matching or beating it on quality in blind tests.
Insight
ElevenLabs set the bar for natural sounding text to speech, and for straightforward narration it is still one of the safest picks. The catch is cost control. The credit pool drains on failed and imperfect takes as well as good ones, so a job that needs several passes can cost far more than the plan implies, and long form projects add up fast. Instant voice cloning oversells itself: expect to use Professional Voice Cloning with a proper recording if the voice has to hold up. The consent question around cloning is real and unresolved, so only clone voices you have clear permission to use. Rivals have closed much of the quality gap, so test a sample against alternatives before committing a large project. Best for short and medium voiceover where quality matters more than volume.
Pricing
Freemium
Website
Last checked 2026-08-30