ElevenLabs: voice beats chat on long calls

ElevenLabs published production data comparing voice and chat performance for hundreds of agents on its platform that run both channels. Voice covered both phone and WhatsApp calls. The company also ran a separate user study.

The company used conversation length as a proxy for complexity. In conversations under a minute, chat succeeded about 9 percentage points more often than voice. Between one and two minutes, the two channels were roughly even. Beyond two minutes, voice success rates were 10.9 points higher, a 31.7% relative increase, and nearly two-thirds of agents performed meaningfully better on voice. Successful long conversations also finished faster on voice, averaging 4.6 minutes against 7 minutes for chat. Of the 90 agents with enough data on both channels, 78% resolved long conversations faster by voice.

Latency was a major factor. Across 315 agents that switched to a faster LLM, a 16% cut in average end-to-end latency correlated with a 26% lift in success rate. Over the same period, the share of calls ending within 15 seconds dropped from 21.1% to 3.8%. ElevenLabs reads this as evidence that callers decide early whether to stay on the line.

In the user study, 98 participants rebooked a simulated canceled flight with both a voice agent and a chat agent, in randomized order. Afterwards, 85% said they preferred voice, citing speed and empathy.

The analysis covered agents with at least 50 voice and 50 chat conversations between July and September 2026. Each agent was compared against itself, using success criteria defined by the business that deployed it. ElevenLabs acknowledges that duration is an imperfect measure of complexity, especially for chat. The findings come from a vendor promoting its ElevenAgents product and have not been independently verified.