Emotional Text to Speech: How to direct AI voice performances with Eleven v4

Emotional text to speech (TTS) turns a script into a performance. Instead of a monotone read, an emotive TTS model delivers every word with feeling, bringing a scene to life with anger, joy, sadness, frustration, and more.

By weaving Audio Tags into the fabric of your script, you shape text to speech performance the same way a director would. Add [furious] to raise the intensity of a line, [sarcastic] to add a glint of dry humor, or any other tag to show the model how you’d like a line performed. 

With Eleven v4, you have emotional TTS you can direct line by line. Here's how you can build out scripts that bring your writing to life.

What is emotional text to speech?

Emotional text to speech is AI-generated speech that performs a line rather than reading it. It expresses emotion, understands timing and pacing, delivers the right words with emphasis, and adds non-verbal sounds like sighs and laughs.

Eleven v4 is a breakthrough model that changes text into a true performance. With in-line descriptions, the same sentence could be whispered, shouted, or delivered through tears depending on what you envision.

Whether you’re writing an ad campaign for your next launch or are bringing chapters of your novel to life, Eleven v4 is there to support your journey with the highest-quality Text to Speech.

How Eleven v4 interprets emotional direction

Eleven v4 takes emotional direction cues from the Audio Tags in your script and turns it into a natural audio performance.

Here are a few ways you can add emotional direction to a text with Eleven v4 to enhance your final output:

• Audio Tags: Write Audio Tags into your instructions, like [whispers] or [cries] to place in-line direction inside of your script. You’ll be able to create scenes with emotional depth by directing v4 as you would with any stage performer.
• Punctuation: Use punctuation to shape pacing and delivery alongside your Audio Tags. Ellipses slow a line down, dashes cut a speaker off mid-sentence, and exclamation marks add intensity, giving you another layer of direction without adding a tag.
• Emotional continuity: Start a sentence with an emotion, and Eleven v4 carries that tone across the line. Build your scenes iteratively and create rich, contextual scripts with audio tags on v4.

To show how effective Audio Tags at bringing text to life with v4, let’s explore the difference between tagged and untagged audio as an example.

In this first sample, we’re just using a default sentence. For reference, we’re using Siren for these examples.

Now, this second example has the same sentence with Audio Tags added. We’ve got emotional cues, sound effects, and even noises beyond the text, like an evil laugh.