Nine commercial text-to-speech systems tested on 274 medicines in clinical sentences; ElevenLabs, Google, Deepgram, Microsoft and OpenAI models drop sharply on recently approved drugs

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Synthio Labs, a clinical-grade voice and agentic AI company for pharma, today published DOSE (Drug-name Oral Synthesis Evaluation), the first public benchmark of how accurately text-to-speech (TTS) systems pronounce drug names. DOSE tests nine models on 274 drug names, 146 of them newly approved, each read inside a real clinical sentence. Read the full report here.

Sounding natural and saying the medicine correctly are different skills. General-purpose models passed between 63.1% and 80.3% of drug names overall. On newly approved names, every model fell: ElevenLabs’ eleven_v3 dropped from 93.0% on established names to 67.1%; Google’s Gemini TTS from 89.1% to 61.6%. Microsoft Azure passed fewer than half of generic (INN) names. One system spelled Xofluza letter by letter.

“Voice models are sold on how human they sound. A model can sound human and still mispronounce the drug name, and in pharma that is the failure that matters,” said Rajashekar Vasantha, Co-founder & CTO, Synthio Labs. “Sound-alike drug name confusion is a patient-safety category WHO, ISMP and FDA already track. Voice AI adds a new speaker to that problem, and nobody has measured it.”

DOSE scores each system’s pronunciation from 0 to 5 against verified reference pronunciations; a score of 4 or higher passes. Synthio Labs’ own RxPronounce model is one of the nine; it passed 91.2% of names overall and 87.0% of newly approved names, 10.9 points ahead of the next system.

“The pattern tracks where training data runs out,” said Supreet Deshpande, Co-founder and CEO, Synthio Labs. “Every model handles metformin, a legacy diabetes drug, but they struggle with the molecule approved last quarter, exactly the name a launch team or a patient most needs spoken correctly.”

The full dataset with audio is published on Hugging Face.

About Synthio Labs

Synthio Labs builds the AI-native engagement platform for life sciences, helping pharma commercial and medical teams deploy clinical-grade voice AI systems at scale. Its platform spans AI agents for HCP and patient engagement, field companions, HCP intelligence, and AI-powered simulation and market research. Already deployed live at several global top-10 pharma companies. Available to procure through AWS Marketplace.

Contact

Ketaki Kakade
Head of Growth
Synthio Labs
ketaki@synthiolabs.com 

Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/3009009/Synthio_Labs_co_founders.jpg

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/synthio-labs-launches-dose-benchmark-leading-voice-ai-models-mispronounce-up-to-one-in-three-newly-approved-drug-names-302880963.html

SOURCE Synthio Labs