ElevenLabs: Audio & Voice Tools for Your Creative Workflow

Design is quickly moving beyond just pixels and layout. These days, we're often expected to be a bit of a "creative department of one," which means handling audio and video alongside our usual UX or visual work. I've been exploring ElevenLabs lately, and it's a tool that genuinely helps bridge that gap without making you feel like you need a degree in sound engineering.

What's Valuable About Using ElevenLabs?

When you're working on a project, finding the right assets can be a massive time-sink that's hard to explain to clients and bill for. Here's how this fits into a design workflow:

Custom tracks that fit your vibe

• Bespoke Audio: Instead of spending hours digging through generic stock music libraries, you can generate a track that fits the exact mood and length of your video or presentation.
• Total Control: If you're on a paid plan, you own the rights to what you make. This means no more worrying about copyright strikes on social media or recurring fees for client projects.
• Specific Sound Effects: If you need something hyper-specific, like "the sound of a digital interface clicking in a hollow room," you can just describe it. It beats settling for a "close enough" sound effect from a free site.

Making your workflow smoother

• Zero-friction updates: If a client changes a single sentence in a script, you don't have to worry about recording it yourself or hiring someone else again. You just update the text, hit generate, and your voiceover is fixed in seconds.
• Leveling up your pitches: Instead of using your own voice or a basic robotic placeholder for a presentation, you can generate high-quality narration for storyboards and pitch decks. This helps your clients hear exactly how the final project will feel, allowing them to sign off on your vision before you've even hired a voice actor or spent a cent of the production budget.
• Automation for variations: If you're running A/B tests on ads, you can use the "Flows" feature to batch-produce dozens of versions with different voices or music styles all at once.

Designing for everyone

• Natural Dubbing: If you're working on a global product, you can dub video content into over 70 languages while keeping the original speaker's tone. It's a huge win for consistency.
• Accessibility: It's a very quick way to add high-quality audio descriptions to your designs, making your work more inclusive without a massive extra effort.
  

A Quick Look at the ElevenLabs Toolkit

The platform is surprisingly deep, but for us, there are three main areas to look at:

• Studio: This is a timeline-based editor. It's where you'll probably spend most of your time importing footage and layering in narration or captions.
• Flows: If you like node-based tools (think Figma's prototyping or logic-based design tools), you'll like this. It lets you build automated "pipelines" for your assets on an infinite canvas.
• Localization: A straightforward way to translate and dub content while keeping the voice sounding like the original person.

Getting Started with ElevenLabs: The Pricing

I always recommend starting with the free version to see if it actually fits into your specific design process.

Sometimes, I use affiliate links with my recommendations, which if bought through, earns me a few cents at no extra cost to you. This helps with the cost of keeping this site alive so I can continue to guide you. I would never recommend anything I don’t or wouldn’t use myself - Rachael

The Free Tier ($0/mo)

This is perfect for experimenting. You get access to their top-tier text-to-speech models and can play around with the voice design tools. It gives you about 10,000 characters a month (roughly 10 minutes of audio), which is plenty for a few small prototypes or experiments. Just a heads up: you do need to attribute ElevenLabs on this tier, and it doesn't cover commercial use.

The Starter Plan (around $5/mo)

If you start doing client work, this is usually the best move. It gives you the commercial rights you need for ads or professional projects, plus it lets you "clone" a voice from a short audio clip — great if you want to use your own voice as a consistent narrator.

The Creator Plan (around $22/mo)

This is for when you're doing heavy video or audio production. It includes professional-grade voice cloning and a much higher character limit (around 2 hours of audio per month).

If you're looking to add another layer to your design toolkit, it's worth a look. You can check out ElevenLabs here and start experimenting with the free tier.