Skip to main content

Elevenlabs Eleven v3 Alpha

ElevenLabs Eleven v3 (Alpha) is a highly expressive, performance-driven text-to-speech (TTS) model designed for advanced voice acting, emotional nuance, and directorial control. It is an experimental, alpha-stage model that excels at extreme human-like expressiveness and responsiveness to direction, but comes with notable trade-offs in stability and consistency. It is best suited for creative, character-driven, short, or performance-heavy use cases where multiple generations and iteration are acceptable.

Key Features

  • Advanced Expressiveness & Directing
    • Extremely responsive to direction, producing highly human-like performances with emotional depth and variation.
  • Audio Tags via Brackets
    • Supports free-text audio tags written in brackets (e.g. [whisper], [angry], [laughs]) to guide delivery and performance.
  • Multilingual Capabilities
    • Supports many languages, enabling expressive delivery beyond English.
  • Main Weakness: Consistency & Stability
    • As an alpha model, results can vary significantly between generations and often require multiple attempts to achieve the desired output, making it hard to use for longer form content.

Technical Capabilities

  • Modalities: Text to Speech 
  • Custom Voice Cloning: Not supported 
  • Supported Settings: Speed control (0.5-1.5), Voice Effects
  • Emotions available: Emotional delivery controlled via a “Stability” slider, with values 0-100. 0 = Very emotional and unpredictable. 100 = Very stable, book-reading delivery.
  • Voice Tags Options: 
    • Add pause; for one second pause, insert  “<break time="1s" />” as part of the prompt
    • Voice Tags; insert absolutely any text in brackets [], such as “[Laughter]” as part of the prompt to direct the voice.
  • Accents Available: Only the voice actor’s native accent
  • Languages Available: English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Afrikaans, Arabic, Armenian, Assamese, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Cebuano, Chichewa, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, Galician, Georgian, Greek, Gujarati, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Korean, Latvian, Lingala, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Malay, Malayalam, Mandarin Chinese, Marathi, Nepali, Norwegian, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Sindhi, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh

Best Use Cases

Character & Voice Acting Content
Ideal for scripted characters, branded commercials, dialogue, storytelling, and creative narration that demands emotional performance.

Performance-Heavy Short Form
Best suited for short scripts where expressive delivery is more important than repeatability.

Creative & Experimental Workflows
Strong choice for exploratory creative work where multiple generations and manual selection are expected.

Strengths and Limitations

Strengths

  • High Emotional Range: Capable of nuanced, dramatic, and human-like performances.
  • Directorial Control: Free-text audio tags enable fine-grained performance guidance. 
  • Expressive Multilingual Output: Emotional delivery extends across many supported languages.

Limitations

  • Low Consistency: Results can vary widely between generations. 
  • Alpha Stability Issues: May introduce unexpected phrasing, delivery changes, artifacts, or audio profiles
  • Iteration Required: Often requires several generations to achieve the desired result.
  • Not Production-Safe by Default: Less suitable for high-volume or long-form workflows, and prone to changes.

Tips for Better Prompts

  • Use Audio Tags Intentionally: Insert bracketed tags directly before the line they should affect
  • Write Like a Script: Stage directions, tone hints, and emotional cues improve results.
  • Expect Iteration: Plan for multiple generations and manual selection.
  • Keep Takes Short: Shorter scripts reduce instability and increase performance quality.
  • Adjust Stability Carefully: Lower stability unlocks expressiveness but increases variability.
  • Use Punctuation for Rhythm: Commas, periods, exclamation marks, and parentheses can be used to direct and guide natural, more expressive pacing. 
    • For example, for a more dramatic effect, the phrase:
      •  “Listen, If we walk away today, me, you, all of us, we may never get another chance.”
    • Can be written: 
      •  “Listen… If we walk away today? me… you… all of us: we may never! get another chance...”
  • Tips for using audio tags: 
    • Situational Awareness – Tags such as [WHISPER], [SHOUTING], and [SIGH] let Eleven v3 react to the moment—raising stakes, softening warnings, or pausing for suspense.
    • Character Performance – From [pirate voice] to [French accent], tags turn narration into role-play. Shift persona mid-line and direct full-on character performances without changing models.
    • Emotional Context – Cues like [sigh], [excited], or [tired] steer feelings moment by moment, layering tension, relief, or humor—no re-recording needed.
    • Narrative Intelligence – Storytelling is timing. Tags such as [pause], [awe], or [dramatic tone] control rhythm and emphasis so AI voices guide the listener through each beat.
    • Multi-Character Dialogue – Write overlapping lines and quick banter with [interrupting], [overlapping], or tone switches. One model, many voices—natural conversation in a single take.
    • Delivery Control – Fine-tune pacing and emphasis. Tags like [pause], [rushed], or [drawn out] give precision over tempo, turning plain text into performance.
    • Accent Emulation – Switch regions on the fly—[American accent], [British accent], [Southern US accent] and more—for culturally rich speech without model swaps.

Need some more help? Head back to our Help Center.