An ElevenLabs alternative for Hindi voices and phone agents

How do ElevenLabs and Voice Infra differ?

ElevenLabs is a voice AI company whose models cover 90+ languages. Its API sells text to speech by the character, speech to text by the hour, and a voice-agent platform, ElevenAgents, by the call minute. The agents page lists 90+ languages and 17k+ voices, with integrations for Twilio, SIP trunks and contact-centre platforms, and LLM usage is passed through on top of each call minute.

Voice Infra is voice infrastructure for Indian calls: TTS, STT, LLM and agents as APIs, priced in rupees. Mira TTS is the voice our agents use, offered on its own, and Mira STT is the speech recognition inside them; both are our own models. Phone agents run the whole Mira stack, from ₹1 a minute at volume (a ₹1,00,000 monthly commitment) to ₹5 pay as you go. Transcription of recorded calls is ₹18 an hour, our LLM is ₹14.38 input and ₹57.52 output per million tokens and is switched on when you ask for it, and streaming speech recognition as a standalone API is in private preview. If you need Tamil or Telugu today, ElevenLabs has them and we do not yet.

What does Hindi speech cost on each?

Both publish a price per 1,000 characters. ElevenLabs charges $0.04 for its low-latency models (v4 Turbo, v3 Conversational, Flash/Turbo) and $0.08 for v4, v3 and v2 Multilingual. Mira TTS is ₹1.80, the same on pay as you go and on the Business plan. For 10 lakh characters (1,000,000), that is $40 or $80 on ElevenLabs and ₹1,800 on Mira TTS, before tax. The output format and sample rate do not change our price, and a request that fails or stops part-way is not charged.

What does a phone agent cost on each?

ElevenLabs’ agent plans include a block of call minutes, from 15 on the free plan to 12,375 on Business, and each additional minute is $0.08, with LLM usage billed separately and your telephony provider billing the carrier side. On Voice Infra the model is in the rate. At volume, T1 is ₹1 a minute against a ₹1,00,000 monthly commitment, which buys 1,00,000 minutes, with Mirai phone calling optional at ₹0.30 a minute. Pay as you go, T5 is ₹5 a minute with the phone line and call insights included, so 1,000 minutes is 1,000 × ₹5 = ₹5,000. All our prices exclude GST, and calls are billed in 10-second blocks.

How does speech to text compare?

ElevenLabs lists Scribe v2 at $0.22 an hour and Scribe v2 Realtime at $0.39 an hour, across 90+ languages. Our offline transcription, Mira Transcribe, is ₹18 an hour of audio and is built for Hindi and Hinglish phone calls, with speakers and timestamps.

On RinggAI’s public benchmark of 10,000 Hindi utterances, Mira STT scored 9.12% normalised word error rate, the lowest of the five systems scored, against 11.11% for ElevenLabs. It is not the best on every corpus in that benchmark: ElevenLabs is lower on FLEURS, and Ringg on CommonVoice and IndicTTS. The vendor scores come from outputs Ringg bundled with the dataset, so their model versions are Ringg’s, and the open model we fine-tuned was trained on the training splits of those corpora. The benchmark is read and prompted speech, not phone calls, so test your own recordings.

What does switching look like?

For text to speech, the change is in the request shape. Mira TTS speaks OpenAI’s POST /v1/audio/speech protocol: send model: "mira-tts", a voice, a response_format and the text. Ask for pcm to stream, ulaw_8000 for Twilio or Plivo streams, or wav for a file. The OpenAI-compatible TTS guide walks through a first request, and the TTS quickstart covers phone audio and the WebSocket endpoint.

For agents, the prompt and greeting become system_prompt and first_message on POST /v2/agents, and calls go out with POST /v2/calls. Plan around two gaps: there is no transfer to a person yet, and a workspace starts at 5 concurrent calls until we raise it.

How do you run a fair listening test?

Write twenty or thirty lines from real calls: customer names, rupee amounts, dates, OTP prompts and the English product words people use in Hindi. Generate each on both services with the voice you would ship, then play them to native speakers in random order with the names hidden. The Hindi TTS guide has a starter set. Listen over a phone line as well as headphones, and for agents time the gap from the caller’s last word to the first audio of the reply, as the latency guide describes.