AI Weekly Malaysia

ElevenLabs launched two new speech models, v4 and v4 Turbo, on September 28, 2026, built on a new architecture that the company says enables voice cloning from just 10 seconds of audio. Language support rises from 70 in v3 to more than 90, with ElevenLabs reporting the largest quality gains in Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin and Cantonese. The models also expand v3's inline expression tags (now stackable in sequence), cut latency for voice agents, and can begin generating audio as soon as the backing LLM starts producing an answer, with handling for confrontations, escalations and holds.

Why: If you run or plan a customer-facing voice agent, the concrete specs to test are the 10-second cloning requirement and the streaming behaviour where audio starts before the LLM finishes, since that is what determines whether a conversation feels turn-based or fluid. The Mandarin and Cantonese quality jump is directly relevant to Malaysian support lines and IVRs, which often serve those languages alongside English and Bahasa Malaysia, and the stacked inline tags are worth re-testing against your existing v3 prompts since tag sequencing behaviour changed. Note this is a vendor announcement with no independent benchmarks or pricing in the text, so treat the quality claims as unverified until you run your own samples.