r/ElevenLabs

I am listening to a book, a memoir, and it mentions suicide. The reader automatically skips over that part. Literally cannot force it to read it and if I was not reading alongside it I would have missed that part.

Is there a way to enable some adult mode?? I wanted to read American Psycho on it later but they’d probably ban me for that.

I'm building a vocabulary-learning app in Flutter where hearing and saying the word correctly is the product, not a nice-to-have. I've hit a problem I can't design around and I'd rather ask than keep patching.

The stack

• Flutter, ~1,600 words live across EN/ES/PT/IT/FR
• TTS: ElevenLabs (eleven_multilingual_v2) called through a Supabase Edge Function so the key never ships in the client
• Every clip cached server-side once per (text, language), shared across all users — so a given string is synthesized exactly once, ever
• Cached again on-device (150MB LRU) so replays are instant and offline
• flutter_tts as fallback behind a 2.5s timeout so playback never goes silent
• STT: speech_to_text for a pronunciation-practice screen — hear the word, say it, get graded

The problem: heteronyms, in both directions

Output. "Wind" (moving air) and "wind" (to coil) are the same string and different sounds. TTS picks one reading and commits. My word library actually knows which sense is on screen — every entry carries a part of speech — but there's no API surface to hand that over. ElevenLabs pronunciation dictionaries are exact-string, case-sensitive, and have no POS or context scoping, so one spelling gets one entry and the second sense is unreachable. Phoneme tags do exist, but per the docs only on eleven_flash_v2 and v3 — not the multilingual model I'm on, and switching models means re-synthesizing the whole cache and losing voice identity across five languages.

Input. This is the part that actually bothers me. The practice screen normalizes the transcript and Levenshtein-scores it against the target. But STT returns orthography — say either reading of "wind" and the transcript is "wind" either way. A learner who mispronounces it scores full marks. The feature is structurally incapable of catching the error it exists to catch.

What I've tried

Respelling the audio-only string before it reaches the engine — the screen text is never touched. wind(noun) → winned, wind(verb) → wined, read(past) → red, and so on. This is basically ElevenLabs' own recommended "alias" workaround and it works for the ~8 vowel-shift pairs I've mapped. Side benefit: since my cache key is a hash of (lang + text), two senses naturally get two cache entries.

It fails in three ways:

1. Stress-shift pairs. REcord/reCORD, PREsent/preSENT, CONtent/conTENT. Respelling can't encode stress, and I haven't found a trick spelling that does.
2. Monolingual. It's an English orthography hack. Nothing about it transfers to ES/PT/IT/FR, all of which have their own homographs.
3. Manual. Hand-curated table. Doesn't scale to a few thousand words.

What I'm actually asking

1. Is there a TTS API that accepts a sense/POS hint, or per-request phonemes, on a multilingual model? Or does everyone route heteronyms to a separate English-only model and eat the voice mismatch?
2. If IPA is the only real answer — has anyone found v3-class IPA reliable enough in production? The docs quote 80–90% consistency, which for a teaching app means the wrong pronunciation ships to a learner one time in eight.
3. For stress-shift specifically: any orthographic trick that works, or is phoneme-level control genuinely the only path?
4. On the STT side — is there a mobile-viable way to get phonemes rather than words? I've looked at wav2vec2 phoneme-CTC or a forced aligner with GOP scoring via ONNX on-device, but I don't know if that's realistic on a mid-range phone or if I'm about to spend a month learning that it isn't. Whisper doesn't help; it also returns orthography.
5. The unglamorous option: detect heteronyms and simply disable pronunciation scoring for them, with an honest note to the user. Is that what shipped apps actually do?

If you've built pronunciation feedback into anything real, I'd love to know where you drew the line between "graded properly" and "good enough." Happy to share code for any of the above.

It's been 2 months since it was previewed, is there any update on the V4 release?

I've seen many good reviews of this AI but I am having an absolute nightmare. I'm running a brand new apple MacBook Air, so more than sufficient for a basic video project. It just seems to constantly glitch.

Currently I'm having a big issue with the fact that the sound just keeps disappearing from the project. The tab will acknowledge their should be sound playing, yet nothing. It isn't my laptop doing this and I don't seem to be accidentally knocking something off. Does anybody have an answer for this? Also, the thumbnail I have for the video has just shrunk down to miniscule size despite the size box being large, and nothing I can do can can seem to bring it back.

I've restarted a project 3 times now for this issue and I'm also losing credits and it doesn't seem fair, aside from the absolute headache.

Apologies in advance because I'm brand new to tech as well as this AI, if it's something stupid then my bad, I just can't seem to figure.

I’m making 8–12 minute YouTube documentaries. With the exact same voice and settings, one section can sound perfect, but the next section has slightly different tone, pacing, or energy.

What’s the best workflow for keeping the voice consistent across a long script?

Looking for a reliable workflow, not just regenerating until it sounds right.

You could search Scottish and choose any voice to see proof but I suspect you Americans won't know the difference.

I want my credits back...

I was banned 24 hours ago and I appealed it, I have not received any reply, should I wait or put another appeal?

I am a full-time youtuber and I was creating one of my YouTube videos in which I was describing an erotic conversation between a husband and a wife. The husband and wife were chatting and they slowly started getting to bed. In my video the husband had some kind of mommy issues and he was calling his wife mommy again and again. I wrote the script around it.

in My script the husband is calling her wife "mommy" and the wife is responding to him as "my sweet baby". The conversation got really erotic and I used 11labs to generate the audio. After an hour my account got logged out and I received the mail from elevenlabs that my account has been terminated due to child safety issues. I am asking now is there any hope for my account because just 5 days ago I purchased a creator plan of 121k credits? I have appealed already but is there any hope or should I just move on?

If eleven labs did not restore my account, my money just got wasted.

The customer support is absolutely useless. It’s like they didn’t say anything at all.

I asked three specific questions, and all I got back were three vague questions in return. They didn’t actually answer anything, didn’t explain how to use it, and provided absolutely no useful instructions or solutions.

What exactly is the point of having customer support if they can’t even answer basic questions or properly explain how their own system works?

This is beyond frustrating. The support is terrible, terrible, terrible. I’m paying for this service and getting treated like my questions don’t even matter. Absolutely ridiculous.

Anthony bourdain would be a fantastic voice for this app. I tried creating the voice within the app but it doesn’t sound anything like him.

I used Eleven Reader for a few days to play audio books while I commute to and from work. I then paid the $100 and committed to a year, now it is unusable. The reader can no longer keep track of my place in the ebook. I run the app on an iPhone promax which 1tb of memory. I paid for the subscription. The epub books are legit purchased from humble bundle. I’m not sure what else I have to do to listen to books. I don’t skip around or do anything weird I just want to start at the beginning and listen until the end. The support link in the app doesn’t work so I am hoping that the community here will help.

Hi, I use 11Labs to create YouTube videos, especially Shorts, but for the past few days, especially after I purchased the subscription of 121K credits, I have noticed that 11Labs is censoring my text-to-speech so much. Even some normal words like mommy or mom, etc., 11Labs is just censoring them again and again. I am unable to create anything right now because of 11Labs' extreme censoring. What should I do? How should I get away with it? Thank you.

I have uploaded multiple voice clips in urdu while creating my instant voice clone.

After that before finishing the whole thing, it gives me the option to preview voice.

When i click on preview voice, it speaks in english in my voice.

If the instant preview voice will remain in english, no one will use my voice if looking for urdu voice and hear english voice.

I have generated speech from text, here it works fine and generate urdu speech.

What's the solution?

I have been using their API to generate audio, but today out of nowhere it gave me the following error. Anyone experienced anything similar? API key does not start with "sk_" and never did, and even their chatbot confirmed their keys don't start like that. What am I missing?

Failed to generate speech: Status code: 400

{

  "detail": {

    "type": "authentication_error",

    "code": "invalid_api_key",

    "message": "API key must start with 'sk_'.",

    "status": "invalid_api_key_prefix",

    ...

  }

}

I was recording my voice to make audio stories for some NGOs for blind children. I learned that some children may not like my voice because they like the stories but not my voice. I don't want to get discouraged and stop doing nobel work.

So I have subscribed to elevenlabs to get some stories in female or soft male voice.

I am very tight on budget so I can't afford to waste credits.

Can you give me some tips to use credits efficiently?