ElevenLabs launches Eleven Realtime speech-to-speech voice agent models
ElevenLabs
Announced October 20, 2026, Eleven Realtime ships as v1 Mini and v1 Max, complete speech-to-speech agents covering ASR, turn-taking, LLM and TTS across 90+ languages and 17,000+ voices. Max scores 98.8% on Big Bench Audio and 87.1% on tool-use tasks against Mini's 75.9% and 60.3%, at 0.57s to first audio, and the API is wire-compatible with OpenAI's Realtime API over WebSocket.
Why it matters
Drop-in compatibility with OpenAI's Realtime protocol lets voice-agent builders switch vendors by changing one endpoint and model string.
Importance: 3/5
notable release with benchmark results and protocol-level compatibility
Sources
official
OpenAI Realtime API compatibility