ElevenLabs started as a text-to-speech company. Their Conversational AI product (sometimes called Eleven Agents) extends that TTS focus into the voice agent space—combining speech input, reasoning, and voice output into a single managed platform.

AssemblyAI's Voice Agent API was built for production voice agents from the ground up. Powered by Universal-3 Pro Streaming—the #1 model on the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard—it starts with world-class speech understanding and builds the rest of the pipeline around getting the input right.

One of these approaches is purpose-built for voice agents that need to complete real tasks. The other is a TTS company expanding into a space that demands much more than good-sounding output.…