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Oh wow, it's interesting that it sings, but the singing itself is terrible! That's maybe more interesting, it sings exactly like a human who can't sing.

Mirage AI has decent singing

https://x.com/aziz4ai/status/1930147568748540189

https://x.com/socialwithaayan/status/1929593864245096570

interestingly not very similar to the actual friends intro - suggesting it isn't a matter of overfitting onto something rather common in the training data.

They have some singing in their demo! So I’m guessing that’s baked into the model

Interesting.

I tried the following prompt and seems like model struggled at the ending "purr"

---

``` [slow paced] [slow guitar music]

Soft ki-tty,

[slight upward inflection on the second word, but still flat] Warm ki-tty,

[words delivered evenly and deliberately, a slight stretch on "fu-ur"] Little ball of fu-ur.

[a minuscule, almost imperceptible increase in tempo and "happiness"] Happy kitty,

[a noticeable slowing down, mimicking sleepiness with a drawn-out "slee-py"] Slee-py kitty,

[each "Purr" is a distinct, short, and non-vibrating sound, almost spoken] Purr. Purr. Purr. ```

That's the reason I don't use Elevenlabs and go with worse solutions, I don't want to feel like I'm paying for a whole chunk of compute, whether I use it or not, every single month, with only the option to pay for a yet larger chunk of compute if I run out.

Terrible pricing model, in my opinion.

> The result with OpenAI feels much less predictable and of lower production quality than ElevenLabs

Thank you Ian! Credit to our research team for making this possible

For the prosidy, if you choose an expressive voice the prosidy should be larger

> But in the end OpenAI's biggest feature is that it's 10x cheaper and completely pay-as-you-go. (Why are all these TTS services doing subscriptions on top of limits and credits? Blech!)

Is it so, after all the LLM and overheads have been considered? Elevenlabs conversational agents are priced at 0.08 per minute at the highest tier. How much is the comparable at Open AI? I did a rough estimate and found it was higher there than at Elevenlabs. Although my napkin calculations could also be wrong.

Yeah it's irritating enough when humans do it, it's so transparently insincere. Just help me with my problem.

I guess I am just old now but I hate talking to computers, I never use Siri or any other voice interfaces, and I don't want computers talking to me as if they are human. Maybe if it were like Star Trek and the computer just said "Working..." and then gave me the answer it would be tolerable. Just please cut out all the conversation.

It's also impossible to turn off in my experience. I have like 5 lines in my ChatGPT profile to tell it to fucking cut off any attempts to validate what I'm saying and all other patronizing behavior. It doesn't give a fuck, stupid shit will tell me that "you are right to question" blah-blah anyway.

I can't wait for American accidental patronizing gets to EU and Australia, nothing like a bot someone "champ" or "bud".

This is straight out of the movie "Her", when OS1 said something like this. And the voice and the intonation is eerily similar to Scarlett Johansson. As soon as I heard this clip, I knew it was meant to mimic that.

"I can help you get a replacement. Here let me pull up a totally hallucinated order number and a link that goes nowhere. Did that solve your problem?"

Are you specifically looking for reasons to be offended? Even if a human said this, it would have been completely fine.

"I am beer" is a pretty funny typo ;-)

But seriously, I wonder why this happens. My experience of working with LLMs in English and Japanese in the same session is that my prompt's language gets "normalized" early in processing. That is to say, the output I get in English isn't very different from the output I get in Japanese. I wonder if the system prompts is treated differently here.

'was'. I departed almost half a year prior to v3's release this week.

The former does not imply the latter.

If you edit the text so that laugh makes sense in the context it should be much more natural like this one: https://x.com/elevenlabsio/status/1930689782331412811

They're also still too expensive, and that's creating a lot of opportunity for other players.

Even though ElevenLabs remains the quality leader, the others aren't that far behind.

There are even a bunch of good TTS models being released as fully open source, especially by cutting-edge Chinese labs and companies. Perhaps in a bid to cut off the legs of American AI companies or to commoditize their compliment. Whatever the case, it's great for consumers.

YCombinator-backed PlayHT has been releasing some of their good stuff too.

> Public API for Eleven v3 (alpha) is coming soon. For early access, please contact sales.

I suspect they themselves don't know the exact pricing yet and want to assess demand first.

Ouch. Professional Voice Actor here.

But it's not an actual person. It's an "AI". Do you want a future where you don't hear actual people anymore? I want to listen to music, audiobooks, poetry, novels, plays, with actual humans talking, that's the whole fucking point.

> Generally it appears the TTS systems all do US accents and the British accent tends to sound like Frasier - an American faking an British accent.

Frasier Crane's accent is an American actor portraying an American character who (with variable intensity depending on situation) is affecting, over the character's own natural accent, either a constructed American accent (the Transatlantic) or a natural American accent (Boston Brahmin), there is some dispute about which or whether its a blend, both of which share some features (in the former case, by deliberate construction) with British pronunciation.

We have lots of great British voices in our voice library! Or if you want to hear an american trying to do a british accent add "[British accent]" at the start of the generation

FYI, Frasier's not "faking a British accent". It's a Boston Brahmin/transatlantic accent.

ElevenLabs v2's accented voices are still much stronger than any of its competition. And I've tried it with Arabic, French, Hindi and English.

With Italian, it starts reading the text with an absolutely comical American accent, but then about 10-20 words in it gradually snaps into a natural Italian pronunciation and it sounds fantastic from that point on. Not sure what's going on behind the scenes, but it sounds like it starts with an en-us baseline and then somehow zones in on the one you specified. Using Alice.

The French one sounded like an Alabaman who took a semester of college French.

But the English sounds really good.

Swedish is just wholly American.

For Portuguese, interestingly enough one of the voices (Liam) has a Spanish accent. Also, the language flag is from Portugal, but the style is clearly Brazilian Portuguese.

Can you try with a voice that was trained on that language? This research preview is more variable based on the voice chosen

German sounds okay.

expressive: https://github.com/resemble-ai/chatterbox

dialogue like notebooklm: https://github.com/nari-labs/dia

I tried Russian as well. It was odd, some of the examples came out really well, whereas others (including the first one) were just awful, like a person only familiar with phonetic pronounciation of individual letters trying to sound out words in a foreign language.

Norwegian is literally just Danish, it's incredibly bad.

*expressive!

This is the feature that has me using Edge at work. Having the browser read every blog/article at 2x speed with word highlighting is awesome.

Give us a try, I think we are what you are looking for

https://narrationbox.com

I dunno. It's definitely a concern in the community. But real people are still getting work.

Audible has ruined their catalog listings with their "Virtual voice" thing and no option to filter them out. They're mostly low quality books narrated by subpar AI voice that don't sell at all, while making it extremely difficult to find quality new books to listen to.

That doesn't sound like a problem they need to solve.

On your client you need to implement some form of echo cancellation.

This is not a model issue - you just have not properly implemented acoustic echo cancellation on your end.

Unfortunately many of the foreign language generation sounds unnatural, with a strong American accent. I've tried the Spanish, Galician, Tagalog, German. I did try the curated samples.

Which language isn't good and I'll get that fixed asap?

Open source stuff like Kokoro and the recent Chatterbox are hot on their heels.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/1kxv01f/p_...

Can you try with this voice? https://elevenlabs.io/app/voice-library?voiceId=xTZlmU8dKXdy...

Voice selection matters more for this model

Just two weeks ago we tried Russian on v2 for a quick kids medical education video.

About 1/4 prompt samples wouldn't work but instead did one of the following:

- Put a random long pause somewhere in the clip and play the other syllables at 10x speed with the remaining space left in the clip - Stop reading the prompt and start talking in literal simlish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW4nfveKW5s - Screaming, as in full goat screaming. Not even our resident AI evangelists could defend that one.

There's something very wrong with the Russian one. The first example "Jessica | Tell History", is British woman speaking British English transliterated from Russian. It's absolute murder of the Russian language and painful to listen to.

The second example "Jessica | Record a commercial" is perfect. Confidence restored.

The third example "Laura | Help a client" is back to glass in your ears. This time an American is speaking American English transliterated from Russian.

Yikes. The English sounded fine, but the Russian has serious issues. Either there's a bug in your configuration (I hope) or your evals for Russian are unsound.

Edit: dial back the editorializing.

I tried Italian and Greek and the examples range from "acceptable" to "lol wtf"

Romanian sounds awful too, like the TTSes from 15 years ago.

It's a research preview for now but it should work well in 70+ languages. Voices make a big difference, can you try with a few Russian IVCs?