Cartesia clone vs ElevenLabs change

Cartesia Voice Clone is 8 credits. ElevenLabs Voice Change is 5 credits. Clone a voice, or convert a take you already recorded. Neither row is lipsync. Neither row is a talking generate. You get an audio file.

Cartesia Voice Clone is content type audio, category voice-clone, audio on, 8 credits. Description: clone any voice using Cartesia; upload a short audio sample to create a personalized voice for text-to-speech generation. The sample becomes a speaker you can write lines for later. You are building a voice, not rewriting one take.

ElevenLabs Voice Change is content type audio, category audio-to-audio, audio on, 5 credits. Description: voice conversion that transforms voice characteristics while preserving speech content. The take already exists. The words stay. The speaker changes.

If you needed a mouth on a face, stop. AI lipsync is a different tool. If you needed a new scene with dialogue in one pass, that is a native-audio video row. These two cards write WAV, not picture.

Clone a voice versus convert a take

The inputs decide the row. Not the brand. Not “which one sounds more premium.”

Clone (Cartesia, 8 credits) when you have a sample of how someone should sound, and you will need many future lines in that voice. Upload the sample. Get a voice you can drive with text. The next script does not require the speaker to sit down again. This is the casting step.

Change (ElevenLabs, 5 credits) when you already have the performance — the pace, the breaths, the timing — and you need it to sound like a different person. The content is locked. The timbre is not. This is the conversion step.

Mixing them is the usual waste:

Running Voice Change because you want a reusable clone. You will convert one take. You will not have a voice you can type into next week.
Running Voice Clone because you have a finished VO and you only wanted it to sound like the founder. You will build a speaker and then still have to generate the line. The original timing is gone unless you recreate it.

Voice cloning is the category name for the first job. Audio-to-audio is the second. Text-to-speech is a third job: no sample, no source take, just a script. Gemini Flash TTS and MiniMax Speech live there. Do not open clone or change because you only have a paragraph.

The clone door in the app is AI voice cloning. The change door is closer to change the voice in a video once you have picture, but the model itself is audio-to-audio. Lay the file after. Do not expect this slug to open a mouth.

Consent is not a catalog field. A sample you do not have the right to clone is still a sample the model will accept. A founder VO you convert into a celebrity timbre is a legal problem, not a 5-credit bargain. Likeness and voice rights sit outside the sticker.

Eight credits and five credits are both audio stickers

Neither number is a video price. There is no resolution. There are no duration chips on these two published rows. You are not buying 4K. You are not buying 15 seconds of picture.

8 credits is the clone. You pay it to create the voice from a short sample. Subsequent reads on that voice are a TTS job, billed on whatever TTS row you then pick. Do not assume the 8-credit clone includes the campaign’s worth of lines.

5 credits is the conversion of a take. One pass over one file at the catalog sticker. If you have twelve takes, you have twelve conversions unless you change the workflow to clone-once-then-TTS.

Cartesia’s other published voice family on Versely includes Sonic-class TTS. This page is only the clone row. ElevenLabs’ other family includes TTS and, on other slugs, other audio jobs. This page is only Voice Change. “I use Cartesia” and “I use ElevenLabs” are not routing rules.

Audio on both cards means the output is sound. It does not mean native audio on a video generate. If you lay this file under a silent face, you still need lipsync or you need to keep the mouth out of frame. Add a voiceover when we do not see the jaw. AI lipsync when we do.

Inline audio tags are not this comparison. Tag support is a TTS-script problem, covered elsewhere. Voice Change preserves content; it does not parse [whisper] in a script you are not sending. Voice Clone creates a speaker; the later TTS row is where markup may or may not work.

Neither row is lipsync

This is the sentence that saves the 8 and the 5.

Lipsync wants picture plus a driving track. Clone wants a sample. Change wants a take. If your timeline is a talking head whose mouth does not match the new VO, you are not done. You have an audio file. The mouth is a second bill.

Typical honest pipelines:

Clone → TTS → lipsync. 8 credits to make the voice, then a TTS sticker for the line, then a lipsync sticker (4 on VEED Lipsync if the take exists; 40 on Fabric if you only have a still). Three rows. One identity.
Record → Voice Change → lipsync. 5 credits to swap the speaker on a take you like, then a mouth pass if we see the face.
Record → Voice Change → lay under b-roll. 5 credits. No lipsync. The face is not in the shot.

Pipeline 3 is the one people skip toward because they want “AI presenter” and they bought an audio row. The presenter never appears. That can be correct. Call it a voiceover.

Photoreal cloned voices of real people are a disclosure problem in the same family as photoreal faces. EU Article 50 from 2 August 2026 is about AI-generated content and deepfakes; deployer labels at first exposure for authentic-looking fakes. A cloned voice in an ad that appears to be a specific person speaking is not “just audio” because the catalog type is audio. Article 50 disclosure. New York’s synthetic performer statute (N.Y. GBL § 396-b, in force 9 June 2026) is about ads with a digitally created human who is not a recognizable natural person — a different fact pattern than cloning a named founder. Do not treat either as a Versely price. They are statutes.

YouTube’s inauthentic-content bucket still cares about synthetic personas presenting as human authorities on healthcare, finance, law, politics (Mashable, 21 July 2026, citing the policy buckets). A cloned medical voice is not cleaned by being 8 credits.

Pick the file you already have

If you have a 12-second sample and a 400-word script, clone. If you have a 40-second VO you will not re-record, change. If you have neither, you want TTS. If you have a face on screen, you want a video row after the audio row.

Run the matching card from the catalog. Confirm audio-only. If the confirm screen asks for a still and 40 credits, you wandered into Fabric. If it asks for video plus audio at 4 credits, you wandered into VEED Lipsync. Back out. Those are mouths.

Caption the video you eventually make. Audio files do not caption themselves. Add captions to video after the picture exists. Captions for silent autoplay still apply when the VO is cloned.

FAQ

Does Cartesia Voice Clone convert an existing take?

No. It clones a speaker from a short sample so you can generate later lines. Converting a take while keeping the words is ElevenLabs Voice Change at 5 credits.

Does ElevenLabs Voice Change give me a reusable voice?

It gives you a converted file. The next script is a new conversion or a different, TTS/clone row. If you need many future lines in one speaker, clone once.

Will either model lipsync a face?

No. Both are audio. Content type is audio. After you have the WAV, pick a lipsync row if the mouth is in frame, or lay the VO under picture if it is not.