Choosing the right voice engine in HeyGen: ElevenLabs, Panda, or Starfish

# Voices

# Voice Engine

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Heygen uses advanced voice engines to enhance avatar realism, emotion, and localization. Each engine is optimized for different avatar speech scenarios, from professional realism to expressive interaction and global accent diversity. In this guide, we’ll walk you through which voice engine to use and when!

What’s covered in this guide:

What is a voice engine?

When to use ElevenLabs, Panda, or Starfish

Limitations to voice engines

What is a voice engine?

A voice engine is the AI-powered system behind realistic, synthetic speech in tools like HeyGen. It takes written text and converts it into spoken audio, replicating natural human qualities like tone, pacing, pronunciation, and emotion.

Voice engines can be trained on real voice recordings to mimic a specific person, or use prebuilt voices of different languages and accents. They’re what make avatars sound lifelike, and when paired with features like Voice Director and Voice Mirroring, they help bring your content to life with clarity, character, and consistency.

When to use ElevenLabs, Panda or Starfish

HeyGen offers multiple voice engines, as each has its own strengths. Some are best for replicating real voices, whereas others shine with expressive delivery or multilingual accuracy. Use this guide to choose the best engine for your avatar’s tone, purpose, and audience.

ElevenLabs is the default voice engine for Custom Voices in HeyGen and meets the needs of most users.

However, we encourage you to try out other voice engines to compare their strengths and see what works best for your use case.

How to change voice engines

You can change the voice engine from the Script Panel in AI Studio. Click on the current voice, then choose your preferred voice engine from the dropdown. This change will apply to the current scene only. To use the same voice engine across the entire video, click ‘Apply voice to all.’

Limitations to voice engine changes

You can switch voice engines for all Custom Voices created natively in HeyGen and some Public Voices, but not Professional Voice Clones or voices created and integrated to HeyGen from a third-party service.

Visit our guide for creating and generating custom voices to learn more!

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