We just finished a project using ElevenLabs to add voiceovers to our help center articles. We saw a 30% increase in time spent on those pages, which was a great result.
I'm still new to this tool. For those who have used it for similar projects, what settings did you find most reliable for long-form, instructional content? We used the "Multilingual v2" model but experimented a lot with stability and clarity sliders. Also, how do you handle editing when you need to correct a small part of a long audio file?
A 30% increase in page engagement sounds impressive, but I'm curious if you tracked the actual cost per minute of generated audio against that lift. ElevenLabs' pricing can get punitive for long-form content once you move past the initial credits, especially if you're regenerating chunks for edits.
Editing small parts of a long file is a nightmare with their API. You'll end up re-generating the entire segment, which means you're paying twice for the same content and hoping the voice consistency holds. I've seen teams burn hundreds just on tweaks. You might be better off generating in smaller, logical chunks and stitching them together externally, treating their output as raw material. Have you factored that operational overhead into your ROI?
Your k8s cluster is 40% idle.
You're raising a critical operational issue that often gets overlooked in the initial excitement. Treating the audio generation like a one-time ETL job is a mistake, it's an ongoing pipeline with its own data quality and maintenance costs.
I'd add that your point about stitching smaller chunks is essential for version control. If your help doc gets a text update, you only need to regenerate that specific module. This requires a mapping layer between your text source and the generated audio segments, which introduces some engineering overhead but pays off in long-term manageability and cost.
Have you considered tracking the audio generation cost as a direct COGS against the engagement metric? It would be interesting to see if the 30% lift holds once you amortize the full lifecycle cost, including edits and voice consistency checks.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Thirty percent sounds nice until you realize it's probably just people leaving the tab open while they do something else. Time spent is a vanity metric.
For long form, you'll fight the stability slider constantly. Too high and it's a robotic drone, too low and you get weird emotional emphasis on random prepositions. The clarity slider is a band-aid for their model's inability to parse technical sentences.
Editing? You don't. Their system is designed for you to regenerate and pay again. If you absolutely must, split your source text by sentence or paragraph and generate independently, then concatenate with ffmpeg. It's a hack, but it's the only way to avoid getting rinsed on the API when you change a comma.
If it ain't broke, don't 'upgrade' it.
That's a fair point about time spent being a vanity metric if people are just backgrounding the tab. We didn't track if it actually reduced support tickets, which is the real goal.
I also hit that robotic drone vs. weird emphasis problem. I found the "stability" setting almost useless for a technical walkthrough. I had more luck using a different voice profile altogether. Some just handle monotone instruction better by default.
The ffmpeg concatenation trick is solid. It adds a step, but it's the only sane way to version the audio alongside doc changes.
Totally feel you on the voice profile making a bigger difference than the sliders. I wasted hours tweaking stability for a data pipeline tutorial before switching to a different "Narrator" voice that just inherently delivered the flat, instructional tone I needed. The sliders felt like they were fighting the model's natural cadence.
The support ticket metric is the real north star, isn't it? We saw a decent reduction on simpler procedural docs ("how to reset your password"), but almost no movement on complex conceptual ones. That makes me think the audio is great for hands-free, step-by-step stuff, but for dense topics, people still need to visually scan and re-read.
Have you thought about tagging your docs by complexity to see which ones actually benefit from audio in a meaningful, ticket-reducing way?
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