Eleven Labs vs Descript

Finally—AI voices that actually sound human

ElevenLabs offers a wide variety of high-quality voices that sound natural and human. The interface is easy to use, and it’s simple to test and fine-tune different tones. It also integrates smoothly into our existing workflows, making it easy to automate calls and adapt to different use cases. The voice cloning and multilingual support add even more flexibility. The real-time voices are impressive but still feel slightly off at times, especially in longer conversations. While there are many voices available, only a few sound truly natural, so finding the right one can take some time. Iterating through voices and settings can be a bit clunky, and the prompt-building suggestions aren’t always helpful—so there’s a lot of trial and error involved to get a reliable setup. It’s a powerful tool, but getting to a production-ready voice takes patience.

Ignacio G.

Good editing software, but transcription needs work for accents

Descript makes it easy to edit any audio or video file. If you're used to working with Microsoft Word, especially, then you'll feel at home with Descript. Made an error? Edit the text, and your audio is updated too. Much like any automated transcription service, Descript struggles with non-neutral accents. So, for example, my Scottish accent means I still need to go in and tidy up at least 50% of the transcript, sometimes more. This can make any time saved on other features moot. I would really like to see more work put into regional accents.

Danny B.

Authentic Sounding Voices!

Love ElevenLabs. For a while I have been looking for a solution to speed up my work. I make YouTube videos for Danish learners, but the voices are often inauthentic and too robotic. ElevenLabs gives voice over artists the chance to record their voice in detail and this provides great results. Not only can I record my own voice, but I have also been able to find other native speakers with great results. The multilingual option has also made it possible for me to mix both English and Danish together so learners can hear both in, for example, a phrase video! Love it! I also really love the ability to create a chat bot!! That is actually what initially attracted me to ElevenLabs.

Liam J.

I like Descript - it would be nice if it weren't so memory intensive

It saves me a ton of time in editing! I appreciate the thoughtfulness in design. It tells me there was a lot of energy put into understanding what podcasters need and I appreciate that. I like the removal of filler words and I like the auto captioning function. Descript is very easy to use. I like the transcript function and the ability to edit it and the audio at the same time simultaneously. It makes my life so much easier. It crashes my pc way too often, and I have a powerful gaming machine with a lot of memory. This stops my work and stresses me out. I do wish navigating the playhead back and forth was easier. The whole application just freezes if I scroll too fast and it this slows me down, especially when I'm in a pinch for time.

Adele W.

Lots of options

There are lots of voices to choose from, and interesting ways to get them to pronounce the words correctly. Tone of voice was a little harder to get right, but for the most part I have been able to figure it out adequately. I like that you can use multiple voices in a single project, so, for example, you can have each character in a book have a different voice. But wow that's a lot of work, and I haven't decided if it's worth it. I may come back to the books in the future and modify them. Since Elevenlabs saves the books in an easy to find dashboard, that will be eminently possible. It lets you organize your book into chapters, and the export function is easy to use. It was a lot of work to sort through the voices and decide which one was best for my project. I don't know how it could be improved. Since my books are science fiction, with aliens, I have some unusual names, I had to figure out tricks to get the voices to pronounce each name correctly, and occasionally (not often) it would pronounce the name right in one paragraph, then give a different pronunciation in another paragraph. Just means you have to be on your toes and catch these things.

LeAnn R.

Saves so much time

Since switching to Descript, I'm able to edit my podcast episodes myself, in wayyyy less time than I thought it would take me. Like - 2 hours on average per episode? And we're talking completely edited, video AND audio versions, with the AI features helping generate show notes, title, transcript (for a blog) and pulling out 5+ snippets for repurposing as short-form video content. Descript makes it easy to turn one hour of recording into a full week (or more) of marketing content. And I absolutely love that. Sometimes there are still (small) chunks of my video that descript maps words to incorrectly, but this is usually after I've been editing quite a bit, so may also just be user error. And it's correctible using the manual correction feature, so not a big issue.

Oliver W.