A Complete Guide to ElevenLabs: Create Natural, Human-Like Voices

Do you remember the old screen readers from before AI-powered solutions came along? They often sounded robotic, monotone and frankly, a bit jarring to listen to.

Whether you’re designing tools for the visually impaired, creating immersive audiobooks or adding a voice to your website, app or video game, ElevenLabs ensures no one has to settle for robotic voices ever again.

In this article, we’ll explore exactly what ElevenLabs is, who it’s for, and how you can start using it today:

• What is ElevenLabs?
• Who is ElevenLabs for?
• How to Get Started with ElevenLabs
• What Makes ElevenLabs Unique: Four Features
• What Can You Do with ElevenLabs?
• ElevenLabs Pricing

What is ElevenLabs?

Elevenlabs is one of the leading platforms for AI-driven voice technology, offering tools to create high-quality, human-like audio with ease. From text-to-speech and voice cloning to sound effects and conversational AI, it’s designed to make creating immersive audio experiences simple and accessible for everyone.

With support for over 30 languages and thousands of voices, it caters for a wide range of applications from audiobooks and gaming to customer service and personalized learning. ElevenLabs empowers anyone to tell stories, share ideas, and engage audiences through the power of voice.

Who is ElevenLabs for?

ElevenLabs is a powerful tool for anyone looking to take advantage of cutting-edge AI voice technology. Whether you’re creating engaging content, improving accessibility or enhancing workflows, ElevenLabs offers natural, lifelike voices tailored to your needs. Here are just a few types of people who can benefit from using ElevenLabs, but its possibilities go far beyond these!

• Accessibility Advocates: Develop tools and resources for visually impaired or non-native language users with natural-sounding text-to-speech and dubbing solutions.
• Content Creators: Create compelling content effortlessly! ElevenLabs offers a wide range of voices, accents, and speaking styles to suit your needs, making it easy to add personality and authenticity to your work.
• Customer Support Teams: Automate customer interactions with lifelike voices for phone systems, chatbots and FAQs, delivering excellent service without compromising on a human touch.
• Gaming Studios: Bring your characters to life! Elevenlabs allows you to create immersive gaming experiences by designing unique voices for each character in your game.
• Independent Authors: Transform your books into immersive audiobooks that match your characters’ personalities and styles, making your storytelling come alive.
• Individuals who prefer audio content: Effortlessly transform written articles into audio with the ElevenReader app. Enjoy your favorite content hands-free, whether you’re commuting, working out, or simply multitasking!
• Media Companies: Streamline your production workflow with AI-generated voices that sound natural and professional. ElevenLabs is perfect for dubbing, narration, and even multilingual projects.

How to Get Started with ElevenLabs

To get started with ElevenLabs, follow these steps:

1. Create an account: Visit the ElevenLabs website and sign up using your email address.

2. Explore the dashboard: After logging in, familiarize yourself with the dashboard, where you can access various features such as Text-to-Speech, Voice Cloning, and Sound Effects.

3. Generate lifelike speech: Navigate to the Text-to-Speech section. Input your desired text. Select a voice from the available options. Click "Generate" to produce the audio.

4. Explore advanced features that we cover in this guide.

What Makes ElevenLabs Unique: Four Features

Feature 1: Realistic Speech

ElevenLabs goes way beyond traditional text-to-speech systems by delivering ultra-realistic audio that mimics natural human speech. Its AI-powered engine doesn’t just read text - it analyzes the context, ensuring that the tone, emotion and emphasis perfectly match what it’s reading. A suspenseful line in a story will sound tense, while a cheerful announcement will sound upbeat and lively.

Feature 2: Extensive Voice Library

ElevenLabs has built an impressive voice library, featuring thousands of unique voices thanks to a thriving community of voice actors and creators. With voices in 32 languages and a wide range of accents, it’s a true reflection of its global community.

What Makes the Voice Library Special?

The voice library offers voices tailored to a wide range of needs, whether you’re looking for a warm, conversational tone for customer service, a commanding voice for narration, or something unique for a video game character. Voices in the library are carefully crafted to sound natural, clera, and engaging, making them ideal for everything from professional projects to creative storytelling.

Find Your Perfect Voice

To make exploration easier, the voice library includes robust search, filters, and sorting options:

• Search by name or keyword: Quickly locate a specific voice or find similar options by uploading an audio file
• Filter by attributes: Narrow down voices by language, accent, gender, age, or use case
• Sort by popularity or quality: Browse trending voices, the most used options, or high-quality recommendations

Feature 3: Voice Cloning (Paid Plans Only)

ElevenLab’s cutting-edge voice cloning technology allows you to create incredibly lifelike replicas of any voice with unmatched precision. Whether you want to preserve a unique voice, craft personalized content, or maintain a consistent tone for your brand, this feature unlocks endless creative potential.

Voice cloning can give your projects a unique edge - replicate a character’s voice for a video game, bring a loved one’s voice into an audiobook, or create tailored voiceovers with your leadership team’s voices.

Voice Cloning Options

ElevenLabs offers two powerful options for voice cloning: Instant Voice Cloning, and Professional Voice Cloning.

As its name implies, Instant Voice Cloning, included with all paid plans, is a quick and easy way to create a voice clone, perfect for hobby projects. While it offers lower quality, it’s accessible and ready to use with minimal setup.

For those seeking the highest quality, Professional Voice Cloning delivers exceptional results by capturing every nuance and detail of the original voice. This option requires more audio input and additional training time, but the payoff is a voice clone that sounds incredibly realistic and polished. Professional Voice Cloning is available from Creator Plans onwards.

Feature 4: Voice Design

Voice Design in ElevenLabs empowers creators to craft one-of-a-kind voices from text prompts, making it possible to fill gaps when the exact voice isn’t available in the Voice Library. While Professional Voice Clones remain the platform’s highest-quality option, Voice Design provides an experimental yet powerful way to create voices tailored to your project’s needs.

Types of Voice Design

• Realistic Voices: Create voices with specific attributes like age, accent, gender, tone, and emotion. For example, “A middle-aged Australian male with a warm, deep voice. Calm and professional.”
• Character Voices: Bring creative characters to life with simple prompts, such as “a grumpy old pirate shouting” or “a cheerful, squeaky mouse”.

Quick Tips for Effective Voice Design

• Be as detailed as possible for realistic voices. Include attributes like age, nationality, tone, and emotion for best results.
• Keep character prompts playful and straightforward. Think about how the character would sound in a story or game.
• Experiment with different prompts to refine your results and find the perfect voice for your project.

What Can You Do with ElevenLabs?

1. Text-to-Speech

How It Works

Using ElevenLabs' Text-to-speech is simple:

1. Input your text: Type or paste your text into the input box.

2. Choose a voice: Select a voice from your collection or the voice library that suits your project’s needs.

3. Optional adjustments: Find-tune settings like stability or similarity to match the desired tone and style.

4. Generate: Click "Generate" to create your audio.

The result? High-quality audio that sounds as if it were performed by a real voice actor.

Tuning Your Voice

With optional settings like stability and similarity sliders, you can adjust how consistent or varied the speech sounds. For example:

• Stability: Lower settings create more emotional variation, while higher settings ensure steadiness for serious tones.
• Similarity: Adjusts how closely the output matches the original voice, allowing flexibility for creative efforts.

Tips for Success

• Use high-quality Text: Proper grammar and punctuation can improve delivery and clarity.
• Match the voice to the content: Select a voice that aligns with the emotion, language, and tone of your project.
• Experiment with the settings: Small tweaks can make a big difference in achieving the perfect performance.

2. Voice Changer

ElevenLabs’ Voice Changer takes audio transformation to the next level, allowing you to convert one voice into another while preserving the original tone, emotion, and delivery. Whether you’re refining a performance, fixing pronunciation, or creating an entirely new sound, this tool ensures a seamless transformation that feels natural and expressive.

What Makes Voice Changer Stand Out?

Voice Changer excels at preserving the subtle, human elements of speech that bring audio to life. Key features include:

• Emotion Retention: Replicates sighs, laughs, whispers, and even cries with lifelike accuracy.
• Cadence Preservation: Maintains the natural rhythm and flow of the original audio.
• Accent and Language Integrity: Keeps accents and languages intact, even when switching to a new voice.

This makes Voice Changer an invaluable tool for projects requiring authentic and emotive audio, such as dubbing, character creation, or refining voiceovers.

How It Works

1. Upload or Record Audio: Use an existing file or record live through your microphone.
2. Choose your voice: Select a voice from your collection that matches your vision
3. Generate the transformation: Click “Generate” to process the audio and experience the results.

Tips for a Better Transformation

• Express yourself: Be as expressive as possible in your recordings. The tool will replicate these emotions beautifully.
• Mind the background noise: Turn on the Remove Background Noise option to clean up your input for smoother output.
• Match the Accent: For the best results, ensure the input accent aligns with your output voice’s tone. For example, an audio clip with a Portuguese accent will retain this accent in the transformed voice.

3. Sound Effects

ElevenLabs’ Sound Effects feature allows creators to generate high-quality, realistic sound effects from simple text descriptions. Whether you’re working on a film, game, or video content, this tool provides an easy and creative way to bring depth and realism to audio projects.

What Makes ElevenLab’s Sound Effects Stand Out?

ElevenLabs’ sound effect are dynamic and tailored. The tool supports a wide range of use cases, including:

• Cinematic Design: Create impactful sounds for films and trailers
• Gaming Immersion: Craft custom effects for games and interactive media
• Foley and Ambience: Produce background sounds for video content

The model understands both natural language and audio-specific terminology, giving you the flexibility to create everything from subtle environmental effects to dramatic soundscapes.

How It Works

1. Describe the Sound: Enter a clear and concise description, such as “glass shattering on concrete” or “footsteps on gravel”.
2. Adjust Settings:
   • Duration: Choose a specific length for the audio (up to 30 seconds) or let the tool determine the best duration automatically.
   • Prompt Influence: Decide how closely the output matches your description. A higher setting ensures precision, while a lower setting introduces creative variation.
3. Generate and Review: Click “Generate” to produce four different sound variations. Choose your favorite or refine the prompt and try again.

Explore and Experiment

The Explore tab allows you to browse community-created sound effects, providing inspiration for your projects. From environmental ambiances to dramatic hits, you can see the full range of what’s possible with this tool.

Tips for Creating Great Sound Effects

• Be Clear and Specific: Simple descriptions like “heavy wooden door creaking open” work well for basic effects.
• Combine Complex Ideas: For layered sounds, descript sequences, e.g. “wind whistling through trees, followed by leaves rustling”.
• Incorporate Audio Terms: Use terms like “impact”, “loop” and “one-shot” to guide the style and feel of the sound.

4. Conversational AI

ElevenLabs’ Conversational AI platform makes it easier than ever to deploy human-like voice agents for a wide range of applications. By combining advanced speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and language modeling, this platform eliminates the need for months of development, enabling businesses and creators to create conversational agents quickly and efficiently.

What Sets Conversational AI Apart?

ElevenLabs integrates all the essential building blocks for seamless, lifelike conversations:

• Speech-to-Text (STT): Fine-tuned transcription that accurately captures spoken dialogue
• Language Models: Choose from Gemini, Claude, OpenAI, or even integrate your own custom language model for tailored purposes.
• Text-to-Speech (TTS): Low-latency, human-like speech in over 31 languages and 5,000+ voices
• Turn-Taking: Custom detection for natural conversational flow, allowing interruptions and seamless back-and-forth exchanges

Together, these components create a powerful and scalable solution that supports thousands of interactions daily, with tools for dynamic agent customization, monitoring, and knowledge base integration.

Applications of Conversational AI

ElevenLabs’ Conversational AI is versatile and can be used in various industries:

• Customer Service: Voice agents trained on company documentation to resolve customer queries, troubleshoot issues, and provide 24/7 multilingual support.
• Virtual Assistants: Agents that help with scheduling, reminders, and staying organized
• Gaming: Create intelligent NPCs that can respond dynamically to players
• Education: Provide personalized learning experiences that engage students by explaining topics, answering questions, and discussing books and articles

ElevenLabs Pricing

ElevenLabs offers flexible pricing for both individuals and businesses, designed to scale with your needs. From hobbyists experimenting with AI-generated audio to enterprises handling thousands of voice interactions, there’s a plan for everyone.

Plans for Individuals

Free Plan

Perfect for trying out ElevenLabs’ AI audio tools. The free plan includes:

• Text-to-speech: 10 minutes per month
• Access to languages and voices: 32 languages and thousands of unique voices
• Features: sound effects generation and synthetic voice creation

Starter Plan ($5/month)

For hobbyists starting out with AI audio, this plan includes everything in the free plan, plus:

• Text-to-speech: 30 minutes per month
• Voice Cloning: Instant Voice Cloning
• Access to Dubbing Studio:
• Commercial license:

Creator Plan ($11/month)

The most popular choice for creators looking to produce premium content. It includes everything in start, plus:

• Text-to-speech: 100 minutes per month
• Voice Cloning: Instant & Professional Voice Cloning
• Audio Native Integration: to add narration to websites and blogs
• Audio quality: Higher quality audio (192 kbps)

Pro Plan ($99/month)

For serious creators ramping up production. This plan offers everything in creator, plus:

• Text-to-speech: 500 minutes per month
• Usage analytics: dashboard
• Audio output: 44.1 kHz PCM audio output via API

Plans for Businesses

Scale Plan ($330/month)

Ideal for startups and publishers, this plan offers everything in Pro, plus:

• Text-to-speech: 2000 minutes per month
• Flexible usage-based billing for additional credits

Business Plan ($1320/month)

Built for rapidly scaling operations, this plan includes everything in Scale, plus:

• Text-to-speech: 11,000 minutes of ultra-high quality TTS per month, or 22,000 minutes of Flash/Turbo TTS
• Professional Voice Clones: Up to 3 available
• Custom Pricing

Everything in Business, plus:

• API access to everything
• Custom terms and assurance
• Priority support
• Significantly discounted pricing at scale

Conclusion

ElevenLabs is revolutionizing voice technology by making it easy for creators, educators, developers, and businesses to generate human-like voices. With AI-powered speech synthesis, voice cloning, and sound effects, it enables the creation of engaging and emotive audio content that sounds more natural than ever before.