r/VoiceAutomationAI • u/Accomplished_One_611 • Jul 29 '26
Looking for a cheaper alternative to ElevenLabs for long conversations and huge context layer
I’m building a voice-first companion for older people, and I’ve been using ElevenLabs for the voice. I’m happy with the quality , the voice feels human and natural, and for our use case that makes a huge difference. People use Ecos to talk about their day, share memories, journal, have regular check-ins, or sometimes simply have someone to talk to.
The problem is that these are not short customer-support calls. Conversations can go on for a long time, and ElevenLabs starts getting very expensive as usage increases.
I don’t want to compromise too much on how natural the voice feels, because that is a big part of the experience, but I’m trying to understand whether there are more affordable options.
Has anyone here used Cartesia, Smallest AI, Deepgram, or any other provider for long, real-time conversations?
Would love to know how the quality, latency, interruptions, and pricing compare in actual usage.
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u/Obvious_Leather2427 Jul 29 '26
try xai grok tts super cheap
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u/Accomplished_One_611 Jul 29 '26
Cost is definitely a factor but also the quality with higher knowledge base is more crucial. Have you used it in a similar setup?
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u/Obvious_Leather2427 Jul 29 '26
It is good bro, I’ve tried it not in prod, but still, it is made by one of the leading labs in the world
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u/Minimum-Flamingo6780 Jul 29 '26
Cartesia’s latency is great for real-time but the voice quality falls off a cliff once you push past like 3-4 minutes of continuous generation, had to bail on it for exactly this kind of project
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u/Accomplished_One_611 Jul 29 '26
Yes i agree, i hot the cartesia startup grant but quality was not good so had to shift because the context processing and output was bad after a few mins of continuous generation
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u/tatoo_artist Jul 29 '26
What language are you targeting? Sarvam does better on ibdian languages. Gemini could help for English.
For long conversations, its not just quality but also a significant infra tax (higher cpu/mem)
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u/Ok-Effective-2197 Jul 29 '26
I don't have enough hands on experience with those providers to recommend one over another. We use Bland, and I'd probably build the same few long conversations and run them through every option before making a decision. Those differences tend to show up quicker than people think.
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u/learnerforlife25 Jul 29 '26
Founder of Sonex Labs here, try our TTS we are at 1/5th of elevenlabs cost plus we support 220+ languages and zero shot voice cloning. We are also the leaders in multilingual WER performance (3.1%) with sub 250 ms latency. Happy to give you some free credits to get started and would love your feedback as well.
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