ElevenLabs Eleven Realtime
Confirmed
The takeaway
On Oct 20, 2026 ElevenLabs released two speech-to-speech models for voice agents: v1 Max for multi-step, tool-heavy work and v1 Mini for cheap conversation, both in 90+ languages with any of 17,000+ voices.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 25 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra173 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5112 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Argon203 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7142 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 112 days before it.
Key facts
- Published Oct 20, 2026; two models: Eleven Realtime v1 Max (complex support and lead-qualification flows, heavy tool calling) and v1 Mini (assistants, tutors, characters)
- Artificial Analysis figures quoted by ElevenLabs: Big Bench Audio Max 98.8% / Mini 75.9%; Full-Duplex-Bench Mini 95.8% / Max 94.1%; Speech Agent Arena Max 998 / Mini 988; tool use Max 87.1% / Mini 60.3%; time to first audio ~0.57 s (Max), ~0.62 s (Mini)
- OpenAI Realtime API compatible over WebSocket (not WebRTC); OpenAI’s SDK works unchanged; runs separately from the ElevenAgents platform
- AA speech-to-speech index (read 2026-10-25): v1 Max #6 of 21 (77.3)
What happened
ElevenLabs, until now mostly a text-to-speech company, shipped end-to-end speech-to-speech models for voice agents and made them a drop-in replacement for OpenAI’s Realtime API.
Why it matters
Voice agents are shifting from speech-to-text, LLM and text-to-speech pipelines to single speech models; ElevenLabs is competing directly with OpenAI on that layer.
Sources
2 sources from 1 site. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 2 primary
Primary
- ElevenLabs: Eleven Realtime (Oct 20)elevenlabs.io, official
- ElevenLabs docs: OpenAI Realtime compatibilityelevenlabs.io, docs
Changes
- Filed