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How much does it cost in the FAQ: Voice Isolator costs 1000 characters for every minute of audio. Since when are characters a currency?

icepat 2y ago
This confused me as well, and made me lose interest. Intentional non-answers like this are rather grating.
samspenc 2y ago
This is par for the course for any text-to-speech or speech-to-text service these days, check out ElevenLabs' other service pricing and it is similar - they have monthly pricing but the character usage is capped at each level. Actually other major cloud providers, including AWS, Azure and GCP, have similar character / token / word count based pricing as well.
- recursive 2y ago
  Text-to-speech and speech-to-text, both involve text, which has characters. Notably, this does not.
  - chankstein38 2y ago
    I'm not trying to argue with you but just want to point out, this is why they made an equivalence between time and characters. We know 1min of audio == 1000 characters so now we know how to translate characters to time.
    - recursive 2y ago
      If that's really it, then why the obtuse intermediate conversion unit? Just bill by the minute.
- Rebelgecko 2y ago
  They charge in characters per time, not money per character
recursive 2y ago
Their pricing page is full of weird uses of "character" as a unit too. Things like "monthly character limit", "additional character pricing", and so on. https://elevenlabs.io/pricing https://elevenlabs.io/pricing Nowhere is this novel usage of "character" defined. I know about text characters, and story characters. But this seems to be different. It's hard to imagine why they didn't define what they mean by "character" or just make the pricing model more straight-forward.
- saghm 2y ago
  I know this is a common kneejerk reaction nowadays, but it's hard not to wonder if this is due to using AI to generate the text on these pages.
  - slama 2y ago
    I assure you they didn't use an LLM to invent their pricing strategy. Elevenlabs subscription levels are designed around converting text-to-speech in the primary use-case. They charge by the character when converting text to speech, so characters are kind of the currency on their site. 1000 characters per minute makes sense in that context and I find it surprisingly expensive compared to generation
    - saghm 2y ago
      I still don't think I understand the pricing model based on your additional info. If characters are currency that you buy with real money, what does "characters per minute" mean? I guess if each character is $0.01 and then you want 20 minutes of audio, you can say that's $10.00 per minute for 20 minutes, but that means that the number of characters in the actual text wouldn't affect it at all, so...why even make up a different currency then?
    - DidYaWipe 2y ago
      Not to mention: What if the vocal portion of an audio clip doesn't translate to characters? What if it's all "oooh" and "ahhh," as in a choral segment?
IvyMike 2y ago
I agree with your annoyance here. I did end up clicking thru to get the full story. On their pricing page (https://elevenlabs.io/pricing https://elevenlabs.io/pricing) they are up front, with several monthly tiers; their "most popular" $11/month tier says "100k Characters/mo (~120 mins audio)"
deleted 2y ago
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kps 2y ago
This comment gets me 3.06 seconds of noise removal.
jonas21 2y ago
The company started out doing text-to-speech and created different pricing tiers based on number of characters in the input text. Now they're branching out into other things, but want to keep the same pricing plans, so the unit is still characters.
- DidYaWipe 2y ago
  That's lame, akin to selling cars by using pears as a unit of exchange.
deleted 2y ago
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chankstein38 2y ago
Knowing how elevenlabs works, that's also pretty crazily expensive. Imagine being someone who has a 4hr podcast they want to feed through this. Oh ok just need 240,000 characters!
kiicia 2y ago
It's like premium currency in games that don't want you to realize how much real money you are spending and premium currency packets are always constructed so that you overspend because you cannot get exact amount needed

icepat 2y ago

This confused me as well, and made me lose interest. Intentional non-answers like this are rather grating.

samspenc 2y ago

This is par for the course for any text-to-speech or speech-to-text service these days, check out ElevenLabs' other service pricing and it is similar - they have monthly pricing but the character usage is capped at each level. Actually other major cloud providers, including AWS, Azure and GCP, have similar character / token / word count based pricing as well.

recursive 2y ago
Text-to-speech and speech-to-text, both involve text, which has characters. Notably, this does not.
- chankstein38 2y ago
  I'm not trying to argue with you but just want to point out, this is why they made an equivalence between time and characters. We know 1min of audio == 1000 characters so now we know how to translate characters to time.
  - recursive 2y ago
    If that's really it, then why the obtuse intermediate conversion unit? Just bill by the minute.
Rebelgecko 2y ago
They charge in characters per time, not money per character

recursive 2y ago

Their pricing page is full of weird uses of "character" as a unit too. Things like "monthly character limit", "additional character pricing", and so on. https://elevenlabs.io/pricing https://elevenlabs.io/pricing Nowhere is this novel usage of "character" defined. I know about text characters, and story characters. But this seems to be different. It's hard to imagine why they didn't define what they mean by "character" or just make the pricing model more straight-forward.

saghm 2y ago
I know this is a common kneejerk reaction nowadays, but it's hard not to wonder if this is due to using AI to generate the text on these pages.
- slama 2y ago
  I assure you they didn't use an LLM to invent their pricing strategy. Elevenlabs subscription levels are designed around converting text-to-speech in the primary use-case. They charge by the character when converting text to speech, so characters are kind of the currency on their site. 1000 characters per minute makes sense in that context and I find it surprisingly expensive compared to generation
  - saghm 2y ago
    I still don't think I understand the pricing model based on your additional info. If characters are currency that you buy with real money, what does "characters per minute" mean? I guess if each character is $0.01 and then you want 20 minutes of audio, you can say that's $10.00 per minute for 20 minutes, but that means that the number of characters in the actual text wouldn't affect it at all, so...why even make up a different currency then?
  - DidYaWipe 2y ago
    Not to mention: What if the vocal portion of an audio clip doesn't translate to characters? What if it's all "oooh" and "ahhh," as in a choral segment?

IvyMike 2y ago

I agree with your annoyance here. I did end up clicking thru to get the full story. On their pricing page (https://elevenlabs.io/pricing https://elevenlabs.io/pricing) they are up front, with several monthly tiers; their "most popular" $11/month tier says "100k Characters/mo (~120 mins audio)"

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

kps 2y ago

This comment gets me 3.06 seconds of noise removal.

jonas21 2y ago

The company started out doing text-to-speech and created different pricing tiers based on number of characters in the input text. Now they're branching out into other things, but want to keep the same pricing plans, so the unit is still characters.

DidYaWipe 2y ago
That's lame, akin to selling cars by using pears as a unit of exchange.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

chankstein38 2y ago

Knowing how elevenlabs works, that's also pretty crazily expensive. Imagine being someone who has a 4hr podcast they want to feed through this. Oh ok just need 240,000 characters!

kiicia 2y ago

It's like premium currency in games that don't want you to realize how much real money you are spending and premium currency packets are always constructed so that you overspend because you cannot get exact amount needed