ElevenLabs launches Eleven Realtime, speech to speech models it says start talking in half a second and answer spoken reasoning questions correctly
Introducing Eleven Realtime, a new class of Speech to Speech models. Voice agents usually make you choose between quick replies or precise answers. Eleven Realtime gives you both. It starts talking in half a second and gets spoken reasoning questions right.
Context
Voice agents that reply quickly without losing accuracy would make phone support and tutoring by AI feel more natural.
ElevenLabs is a voice AI company known for text to speech. Speech to speech models take spoken audio in and produce spoken audio out directly, instead of turning speech into text, running a language model and converting the answer back.
Deep dive
On October 20, ElevenLabs introduced Eleven Realtime, which it called a new class of speech to speech models.
It said voice agents usually make users choose between quick replies and precise answers, and that Eleven Realtime gives both: it starts talking in half a second and gets spoken reasoning questions right. The post did not name the benchmark behind the reasoning claim or compare it with rival models such as OpenAI's voice models.
The video shows two versions, Mini and Max. Mini is matched with customer interviews, educational tutors and interactive characters, and Max with lead qualification and customer support. It plays sample conversations, such as an agent asking a user about their first month with an app and a support agent spotting an outage, and ends with a card for the Eleven API, suggesting the models are offered to developers through ElevenLabs' platform.
The half second response time and the reasoning claim are ElevenLabs' own figures. The post did not give pricing, supported languages or availability details.
Earlier in the month, this deck covered a UK peer using an ElevenLabs recreation of her own voice to give the first AI voiced speech in Parliament, an example of the company's voice cloning work.
What to expect next
Watch for independent tests of Eleven Realtime's response time and reasoning against OpenAI, Google and other voice models. Pricing and language support will decide how widely developers use it for phone and support agents. Also watch whether ElevenLabs publishes the evaluation behind its claim that the models get spoken reasoning questions right, and how the Mini and Max versions differ in speed and cost.