Using ElevenLabs for Multilingual Voice Agents: Limitations to Know
Blog post from Deepgram
The article examines the limitations of using ElevenLabs for multilingual voice agents, highlighting issues such as inconsistent pronunciation, latency challenges, and lack of mid-conversation language switching. It underscores that ElevenLabs' text-to-speech (TTS) system defaults to English for entity pronunciation in non-English languages, necessitating manual text preprocessing to ensure accuracy. The fixed language per API call restricts code-switching, posing challenges for bilingual interactions. Additionally, the article points out that while ElevenLabs offers different model tiers, higher-quality multilingual models incur increased latency and costs, which can impact customer trust and operational efficiency. It advises evaluating these constraints and considering alternatives like Deepgram or AWS Polly for scenarios requiring seamless multilingual support and consistent latency under concurrent loads.