ElevenLabs launches Eleven v4 and Eleven v4 Turbo, #1 on Artificial Analysis TTS arena
Confirmed
Importance: major (4 of 5)Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- Major (4 of 5)
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra151 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.590 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen181 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7120 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 90 days before it.
Key facts
- Model ids: eleven_v4 (10,000 chars/request) and eleven_v4_turbo; 90+ languages incl. new Cantonese, Mongolian, Odia
- List price $0.08 / 1K chars (v4), $0.04 / 1K (v4 Turbo); launch promo 72% off until 2026-10-12: $22 / $11 per 1M chars
- v4 Turbo: ~100 ms median inference latency, ~150 ms median time to first speech (ElevenLabs cites Cartesia Sonic 3.6 at 262 ms, GPT-4o mini TTS at 814 ms)
- Artificial Analysis: #1 Provider Voice TTS Arena (Elo ~1315-1319, ahead of Sonic 3.6 1275 and Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS 1267), #1 Pronunciation Robustness, #2 Controlled Voice
- Preferred by ~75% (65-81%) of listeners in ElevenLabs’ blind head-to-head tests vs Cartesia, Inworld, Google, xAI, OpenAI TTS
- Instant Voice Clones from ~10 s of audio; Professional Voice Clones supported again; inline tags for emotion, pacing, reactions, SFX and style; IPA pronunciation control
- Available in ElevenAgents, ElevenCreative and ElevenAPI (incl. free tier); free for Creator+ plans in ElevenCreative for two weeks (up to 2x monthly credits)
- No SSML and no Style/Speed sliders (Stability + Similarity only)
What happened
ElevenLabs released Eleven v4 and Eleven v4 Turbo on 2026-09-28. The blog, YouTube launch video (07:01 PT) and X announcement came out the same day.
v4 replaces Eleven v3 (June 2025 alpha, GA February 2026) as the flagship. ElevenLabs says it is built on “an entirely new architecture that reads a script the way a voice actor would”.
Turbo is aimed at ElevenAgents and other live uses. Model files: data/models/elevenlabs-v4.md.
Caveats: the blind-test preference and latency comparisons come from ElevenLabs. The docs still recommend 1-2 minutes of audio for Instant Voice Clones, while the marketing says 10 seconds.
Why it matters
ElevenLabs had fallen behind Cartesia, Google and others on the Artificial Analysis arena with v3 (Elo ~1169). v4 puts it back at #1, and Turbo brings expressive, tag-directed speech to sub-200 ms voice agents at a launch price well below v3.
Sources
11 sources from 5 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
11 sources: 7 primary, 1 press, 3 reactions
Primary
- ElevenLabs blog: Eleven v4elevenlabs.io, official
- Eleven v4 landing pageelevenlabs.io, official
- Docs: Eleven v4elevenlabs.io, docs
- Docs: Modelselevenlabs.io, docs
- API pricingelevenlabs.io, docs
- ElevenLabs on X: launchx.com, official
- ElevenLabs on X: launch pricingx.com, official
Press
- RuntimeWire: ElevenLabs ships v4 voice modelsruntimewire.com, press
Reactions
- Artificial Analysis on X: Eleven v4 takes #1x.com, discussion
- Artificial Analysis TTS leaderboardartificialanalysis.ai, discussion
- YouTube (ElevenLabs): Introducing Eleven v4 and Eleven v4 Turboyoutube.com, video
Changes
- Filed
