Is Eleven Realtime state of the art?Pending benchmarks.Announced Oct 20, 2026; no independent results yet.
ElevenLabs' new class of speech-to-speech models for voice agents, which the lab says starts talking in about half a second. Two models: v1 Mini for natural conversation at low cost and v1 Max for complex, multi-step tasks. Live in ElevenAgents and over a WebSocket Realtime API; proprietary.
The details so far
- Lab
- ElevenLabs
- Announced
- Oct 20, 2026
- API
- Live
- Open weights
- Closed
- Models
- Eleven Realtime v1 Mini (eleven_realtime_v1_mini) and Eleven Realtime v1 Max
- Type
- Speech-to-speech voice agent model; not a speech-to-text or text-to-speech model
- Access
- ElevenAgents (model dropdown) and the Realtime API over WebSocket, compatible with OpenAI's Realtime API
- Languages and voices
- 90+ languages; any of the 17,000+ voices in the ElevenLabs library (lab statement)
- Price (ElevenLabs)
- $0.08 per minute of connected audio plus LLM tokens: Mini $0.20 / $6.00, Max $1.80 / $9.00 per 1M input / output tokens
- Weights
- Proprietary; no open weights
Tags marked unsure are not stated on the lab's own pages.
What would let us call it
Verdicts use only independent boards we already track. Two consecutive snapshots are required before any crown.
- Publicly announced with a source
- Usable by the public (API or weights)
- Listed on an independent board we track
- Enough results for a rank in a category
- Holds across two snapshots (crowns only)
What the lab claims
Self-reported. Shown for context; not used in any verdict.
Lab claim: v1 Max answers 98.8% of Big Bench Audio questions correctly with 0.57 s average time to first audio; v1 Mini 75.9% and 0.62 s. ElevenLabs says Artificial Analysis ran these evaluations.
Lab claim: on Full-Duplex-Bench, v1 Mini scores 95.8% and v1 Max 94.1%; on tool-use tasks, v1 Max completes 87.1% and v1 Mini 60.3%.
Sources
LABElevenLabs announcement on Xx.com/ElevenLabs/status/2112550782063247521 · Oct 20, 2026LABIntroducing Eleven Realtime (ElevenLabs blog)elevenlabs.io/blog/realtime · Oct 20, 2026LABElevenAPI pricingelevenlabs.io/pricing/api · Oct 20, 2026Tracking continues until an independent board lists it.