Sarvam vs ElevenLabs vs Sonex Labs for Indian-language text to speech

Why compare these three for Indian languages?

Teams choosing text to speech for an Indian product tend to end up with the same shortlist. Sonex Labs, which publishes this page, is a multilingual voice platform, with a long tail of Indian dialects and one price for every language. Sarvam is the India-focused option, priced in rupees and built around the scheduled languages. ElevenLabs is the global option most people have heard of, and its Eleven v4 release on 28 September 2026 pushed its language list past 90. October 2026 has been busy: Sarvam launched Bulbul V4 Flash on 13 October and announced that Bulbul V3 leaves its Voice Agents product on 10 November 2026, though it stays on the text to speech API.

This comparison is about text to speech for Indian languages: what each vendor covers, how each handles phone audio, how much evidence there is about quality and speed, how cloning and mixed-language speech work, and what it costs at 1 million and 10 million characters a month. It isn't a ranked benchmark, since none of us publishes an independent, Indian-language quality score. For voice agents and speech recognition, see Sonex Labs vs Sarvam AI. Every competitor fact below links to the vendor's own page, checked on 24 October 2026.

What are Pāṇini, Bulbul and Eleven v4?

Pāṇini is the Sonex Labs text to speech model. It speaks 250+ languages in 34 writing systems, including 36+ Indian languages and dialects, with 120 platform voices. It reads mixed-language text such as Hinglish naturally in one voice, is trained for 8 kHz phone audio, starts streaming audio in under 200 ms (time to first byte), and is priced at one dollar rate for every language on our pricing page.

Bulbul is Sarvam AI's text to speech family for Indian languages. The two current API models are Bulbul V3, which covers 10 Indian languages plus Indian English, and Bulbul V4 Flash, the newer, cheaper and faster model, which covers eight Indian languages plus English and an English–Hindi code-mix style. Sarvam sells it per character in rupees, with lower rates on its monthly plans, alongside its own speech recognition and voice agent products.

Eleven v4 is ElevenLabs' current flagship speech model, with a lower-latency sibling, v4 Turbo. Both support 90+ languages, and ElevenLabs also still offers Eleven v3, Multilingual v2 and Flash v2.5. ElevenLabs sells by the character through its API and through monthly subscriptions from $6 to $990, and its customers range from audiobooks and dubbing to agents.

What should decide the choice?

The first question is whether your listeners' languages are on each list at all, and on which model. Language counts hide a lot: a vendor can support a language on its premium model and not on its fast one, and a dialect speaker will notice immediately if they hear the standard form instead. The second is where the audio is played. A voice heard on a phone call goes through an 8 kHz channel that removes much of what makes a studio voice sound rich, so test in the channel you'll ship in.

After that, weigh latency if you're building anything conversational, mixed-language handling if your users switch between English and their own language, cloning if you need a brand or presenter voice, and pronunciation controls if your scripts are full of names, product terms and numbers. Finally, cost: work it out at your real monthly volume, on the model you'd actually use and for every language you serve, because the gap between a vendor's fast and premium models, or between its covered and uncovered languages, can be larger than the gap between vendors.

How do the three compare at a glance?

Which covers the languages your listeners actually speak?

Pāṇini speaks 250+ languages in 34 writing systems, listed in full on our languages page. For India that means 36+ languages and dialects, including Bhojpuri, Marwari, Haryanvi, Garhwali, Maithili, Chhattisgarhi, Mewari, Saraiki, Bundeli, Braj, Angika and Bhili, and Dogri, Konkani, Tulu and Santali. Neither Sarvam nor ElevenLabs lists an Indian dialect for text to speech. If your product serves customers in Bihar, Haryana, Uttarakhand or Rajasthan, this is the factor most likely to decide it, and a short test with native speakers will show the difference quickly. The rest of our list is billed at the same rate.

Between the other two, ElevenLabs lists more Indian languages. Eleven v4, v4 Turbo and v3 cover Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu, while its older Multilingual v2 and Flash v2.5 support only Hindi and Tamil among Indian languages. Bulbul V3 covers Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi and Odia plus Indian English, and Bulbul V4 Flash drops Malayalam and Odia, which Sarvam says are "not yet offered" on Flash.

Mixed-language speech is the other half. Sarvam offers an English–Hindi (enhi) code-mix style on some Bulbul V4 Flash voices. ElevenLabs makes no explicit code-switching claim on its models page, which says v4 keeps voice quality consistent across language switches. Pāṇini reads Hinglish and other mixed-language text naturally in one voice (Hinglish), and one voice or clone can speak across languages. For every vendor, only your own sentences will show the differences.

What quality evidence exists, and how does each sound on a phone line?

ElevenLabs is the only one of the three that publishes quality evidence. Its v4 launch post reports that listeners preferred Eleven v4 in about 75% of blind head-to-head tests against Cartesia, Inworld and Google models, and says v4 ranked first on the Artificial Analysis provider voice arena in September 2026. Those are vendor-run or vendor-cited results, and none is specific to Indian languages or phone audio. The independent Artificial Analysis Speech Arena ranks models from blind listener votes, but its votes aren't broken out by Indian language either.

Sarvam's Bulbul V4 Flash post describes the voices as better than V3, with richer prosody, but gives no scores or method, and we don't publish a MOS or word-error-rate benchmark for Pāṇini. So for Indian languages, nobody has published the comparison you need, and the useful test is a blind listening test with native speakers in the channel you'll ship in. For phone lines, Pāṇini is trained for 8 kHz phone audio; Bulbul can output 8 kHz, but Sarvam doesn't say what it trained on, and ElevenLabs' blind tests don't say whether they were run on phone-quality audio, so play all three over a real call. You can hear Pāṇini first on any language page under text to speech, such as Maithili, each with a live playground.

Stock voices differ too. Sonex Labs has 120 platform voices. Sarvam's docs list over 200 persona voices for V4 Flash, while its launch post counts 83 voices across 11 languages, the difference being how speaking styles are counted. ElevenLabs' community Voice Library holds more than 10,000 shared voices, the largest of the three.

How fast does each return the first audio?

We report under 200 ms to first byte for Pāṇini. Sarvam reports that Bulbul V4 Flash delivers under 250 ms time to first audio in production, up to 40% faster than V3. ElevenLabs publishes the lowest figures: its models page gives Eleven v4 Turbo a median inference latency of about 100 ms, excluding application and network time, and Flash v2.5 about 75 ms, and the launch post puts v4 Turbo's median time to first speech at about 150 ms with network latency removed. ElevenLabs gives no latency figure for v4 itself, and Flash v2.5 covers only Hindi and Tamil among Indian languages.

These numbers measure different moments, from pure model inference to first audio in production, and none includes the network between your servers and the vendor's. For a phone agent in India, the round trip to wherever the model runs can be as large as the differences between them. Measure time to first audio from your own servers, at the times of day your traffic peaks, and compare the slowest tenth of requests, not just the median.

How do cloning and pronunciation controls compare?

All three clone a voice from a short sample. Pāṇini clones from a 10-second sample, the clone carries across languages, and one clone is included in the free tier. Sarvam's instant voice cloning is in beta, recommends a 10–15 second clip, and can speak a language different from the reference; cloned speech costs ₹2.00 per 1,000 characters on every plan. ElevenLabs' instant voice clones need about 10 seconds of audio, start on the $6 Starter plan according to its pricing page, and v4 also offers Professional Voice Clones trained on more of a speaker's audio, for studio-grade narration.

Pronunciation is where scripts full of names, brands and codes go wrong. Sarvam's own migration guide from ElevenLabs is a useful, if vendor-written, map of the differences: it says ElevenLabs pronunciation dictionaries support IPA phoneme rules and word aliases, while Sarvam's are word-alias substitutions per language, available on Bulbul V3 only. The same guide notes per-request character limits on Sarvam of 2,500 characters for REST and WebSocket on V3 and 3,500 for HTTP streaming, against 10,000 on ElevenLabs Multilingual v2. Test your hardest names on all three before deciding.

What does each cost at 1 million and 10 million characters?

Sonex Labs charges $0.03125 per 1,000 characters for every one of its 250+ languages, or $0.028125 on the $5/month plan, so a dialect costs the same as Hindi. As of 24 October 2026, Sarvam charges ₹3.00 per 1,000 characters for Bulbul V3, which is exactly our rate at ₹96 to the dollar, and ₹2.00 for Bulbul V4 Flash on pay as you go (₹1.85 on its ₹9,999 Pro plan, ₹1.70 on Growth and Business). ElevenLabs' API charges $0.08 per 1,000 characters for Eleven v4, v3 and Multilingual v2, and $0.04 for v4 Turbo and Flash. Prices are before GST and other taxes, at pay-as-you-go API rates for the competitors, since how Sarvam's plan fees offset usage isn't spelled out on its pricing page, and ElevenLabs' subscriptions bundle credits rather than changing the API rate.

At 10 million characters a month, we cost $286 on the monthly plan, against $400 on ElevenLabs v4 Turbo and $800 on Eleven v4, and the same as Sarvam's Bulbul V3 at pay as you go. Sarvam's V4 Flash is cheaper, at about $208, for the eight Indian languages it covers. What our rate adds is the dialects and the languages outside Bulbul's list, which have no Sarvam price at all, at no premium.

When is Sonex Labs the better choice?

Choose Sonex Labs if your listeners speak an Indian dialect at home: Bhojpuri, Maithili or Angika for a collections, loan-servicing or health-reminder line in Bihar, Marwari or Mewari for customers in Rajasthan, Haryanvi for Haryana, Chhattisgarhi for Chhattisgarh, Garhwali for Uttarakhand, or Bundeli, Braj and Bhili for rollouts across northern, central and western India. Each is on Pāṇini at the same rate as Hindi.

Choose it if you serve several countries and want one vendor and one price across a 250+ language list. Choose it if your scripts mix English with Hindi or another language and should be read in one voice, or if you want a cloned voice from a 10-second sample that speaks every language you serve, with one clone in the free tier, and streaming that starts in under 200 ms.

Choose it if you'd rather price every market at one rate than juggle a different model per language: at pay-as-you-go rates you'll pay the same as Sarvam's V3 and less than ElevenLabs' v4 Turbo. And choose it if you also need speech recognition across 100+ languages, with automatic language detection, at $0.00525 per minute of audio, billed by the second, or voice agents on the same platform.

When is Sarvam or ElevenLabs the better choice?

Choose Sarvam if your users speak the languages on Bulbul V4 Flash, the voices pass your listening test, and cost per character decides it, or if you want an India-focused speech recognition model covering 22 Indian languages plus English from the same vendor.

Choose ElevenLabs if you need the lowest published latency, phoneme-level pronunciation control, Professional Voice Clones, a very large voice library, or published blind-test evidence, and the higher per-character price fits your budget.

How do you run a fair test of all three?

Take 30 to 50 sentences from your real content, weighted toward what usually breaks: proper names, addresses, rupee amounts, dates, phone numbers, abbreviations and sentences that mix English with the local language. Generate each one on Pāṇini, Bulbul V4 Flash and Eleven v4 Turbo (and v4 if you'd pay for it), using the closest voice each offers, in the format you'll ship: phone-line audio if it's going down a phone line, full bandwidth for an app or video. Play them in random order to native speakers who don't know the source, and ask for a naturalness rating and a note of any word they'd have misheard.

Alongside that, clone the same speaker on all three from the same clip and listen to the clone speaking a second language. Time 200 requests per vendor from your own servers and look at the slowest tenth, not just the median. Then price a real month of your characters on each, on the model that passed the listening test and for every language you serve. The free allowances on all three are enough to run a test this size for a single language.