Cartesia vs 11 Labs · Assistable.ai

Jul '25 (edited) • 🏰 Homebase

Cartesia vs 11 Labs

If you didn’t catch it,

gave us access to the Cartesia voices for our voice assistants. I ran about two to three hours of tests, and honestly, Cartesia is blazingly fast. It’s beautifully fast. The voices sound solid too, but here’s the thing: it struggles with advanced prompting. When you try to add pauses or breaks, the TTS doesn’t handle it well. I think it’s just how their system is built since it’s geared more toward speed than flexibility.

If you’re looking for something more natural and consistent, Eleven Labs still wins without question. That’s been my early experience. If you just need a quick, plug-and-play voice assistant, Cartesia works great. I even tried prompting it with some soft pauses to make it sound more natural, but it didn’t really take. It does include a little bit of inflection out of the box, but it takes a lot of fine-tuning to get it just right.

I’ll probably mix and match depending on the client’s needs. Just wanted to give you the update. Test it out and let me know what you see on your end.

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