Air AI vs ElevenLabs Agents
A side-by-side comparison of capabilities, autonomy, integrations, and pricing to help you choose.
Short answer: choose Air AI if you want defunct ai voice agent; subject of a 2026 ftc enforcement settlement (Autonomous agent, enterprise); choose ElevenLabs Agents if you want platform for building real-time voice and chat ai agents (Supervised agent, subscription).
| Air AI | ElevenLabs Agents | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Defunct AI voice agent; subject of a 2026 FTC enforcement settlement | Platform for building real-time voice and chat AI agents |
| Type | agent | platform |
| Autonomy | Autonomous agent | Supervised agent |
| Pricing | enterprise | subscription · Free tier; paid plans from ~$5/mo + usage |
| Best for | smb | developers, mid-market, enterprise |
| Deployment | saas | saas, api |
| Modalities | voice | voice, text, api |
| Models | proprietary | proprietary, model-agnostic, claude, gpt, gemini |
| Protocols | none | mcp, function-calling, rest-api |
| Integrations | - | Twilio, Genesys, Vonage, Telnyx, Plivo, HubSpot |
| Capabilities | 2 documented | 4 documented |
Air AI
- +2023 demos were unusually natural and long-duration for the era and reached a wide audience
- -Defunct: no live product, and the air.ai domain now belongs to an unrelated company
- -Subject of an FTC enforcement action and 2026 settlement banning the owners from marketing business opportunities
ElevenLabs Agents
- +LLM-agnostic on top of best-in-class proprietary text-to-speech and its own speech-to-text
- +Strong first-class telephony story (Twilio, SIP, multiple carriers) with sub-second latency
- +Flexible build paths: no-code builder, SDKs, WebSocket API, function calling, and MCP
- -Layered, recently changed pricing (bundled minutes plus overage plus pass-through LLM cost) makes total cost hard to predict
- -Autonomy is bounded to configured tools, not autonomous out of the box
Which should you choose?
Air AI is defunct ai voice agent; subject of a 2026 ftc enforcement settlement, best for smb. ElevenLabs Agents is platform for building real-time voice and chat ai agents, best for developers, mid-market, enterprise. The right choice depends on the autonomy level you want, your existing integrations, and your budget, all compared above.