Now there are a lot of AI tools for Audio already, but when it comes to Voice Synthesis and Audio narration, probably one of the best tools right now is Elevenlabs, which just went through a couple of updates that I want to talk about in this review today.

So, what exactly can Elevenlabs do right now? Well, there are a couple of key features here that they offer right now, both free/paid versions.

• Text To Speech – Over 20 different voices with 29 different languages available, from English to Chinese to Japanese, there is a great selection of things here for a lot of people around the world
• Speech to Speech – You can upload your own voice file, and it will be narrated by another person. This will also clean up the existing audio file, so if you have background noise and things like that, this will alter it to a higher quality
• Sound Effects – Give a prompt for any type of object or event, and it will try to create sounds close to that, anywhere from window breaking, explosions, humming, or nature sounds. This tool is a bit more hit or miss; sometimes it does come now and then gives great results
• Dubbing Studio – Have a video or audio clip that is in a certain language, like English, and want it translated into Spanish? Well, it’s possible with this tool, it keeps your sound very similar when dubbed, even though there might be some errors on the actual translation, depending on the input
• Voice Isolator (NEW) – If you recorded in a bad location or just have bad background noise, this tool just cleans everything up and makes the audio actually great

There are also some features that are behind a paywall, like Voiceover Studio and Audio Native, which have their own uses. Luckily, most of the essential stuff is free to use with registration credits, so unless you’re a heavy user, you can play around plenty for free.

New Video to Sound Feature

The new feature that Elevenlabs recently released was “Video to Sound,” which is fully open source, and you can check it on their GitHub. This perhaps can be considered a bit more niche type of a tool, but it has a lot of functionality, as we are seeing an influx of new Video AI tools that obviously do not come with any sound, so instead of generating a lot of background music and trying to find stock audio for your clips.

Based on the testing I did with this new tool, I have to say it gives mixed results out of the 4 prompts it gives out. I usually find at least one decent, but the quality of the audio itself may need some post-tuning.

Creating like Ocean waves or even sounds for an abstract intro can yield decent results sometimes, so I’m quite impressed by that – plus there aren’t that many limitations right now on the length of the clips, so you should abuse this situation as much as possible, because this is the only tool with this feature that i know.

Let’s talk about Pricing

I would argue that Elevenlabs is quite generous when it comes to their freemium model – first of all you get lot of tools that are included on free version and 10,000 credits which includes around 10 minutes of audio, now if you are like dubbing movies or TV-shows for instance that’s not obviously enough, but lets say a YouTube video that can at least get you 1-2 videos done.

• The next tier starts at 5$/month which is still a relatively good price compared to services like AI Image generation or AI Video generation, which usually start around that 8-12$ ballpark for their cheapest models, but then again, do we value these things at the same price? Well, that’s up to you.
• Creator tier at 11$/month and that comes along with 2h of audio per month, which is 4x more than the previous tier. Also, this gives you higher-quality audio via their API
• Pro Tier is a bit expensive, I have to say, at 99$/month giving you 10 h which, bt,w is less than the previous tier if you would buy it separately, but this, then again, offers a lot more, higher quality audio then again
• Lastly, we have the Scale, which gives you 400h of audio for 300$, and that’s actually a lot of time in my opinion for any large-scale project out there, even for industrial clients.

When it comes to pricing, I think the lower-tier plans are quite generous and good, but perhaps I find the last two tiers slightly overpriced, given the ratio per dollar to audio minutes is a bit off for my taste, but then again, there is serious money to be made with technology like this.

Closing Thoughts about Elevenlabs

So there are a lot of one-trick pony audio services that don’t have much to offer, but Elevenlabs is a bit more serious entry in the context that they have a vast ratio of different Audio models, prompt types, and obviously they keep building up more things on a frequent basis.

If you are looking for more Music generation, I probably would recommend you Suno or something else, but in terms of pure Dubbing and text-to-speech, this tool is probably the best option you have.