Audio
Text-to-speech & voice cloning
Natural speech, voice design and cloning.
What it is
Text-to-speech (TTS) turns text into natural-sounding speech. Modern APIs offer emotional control, many languages, low-latency streaming for voice agents, and cloning a voice from a short sample.
How pricing works
Billed per character of input text (sometimes per minute of audio or subscription credits). We normalise to 1M characters (≈ 20 hours of speech).
We compare everything in one unit: USD per 1M characters.
Typical uses
- Voice agents and IVR
- Audiobooks and narration
- Accessibility
- Video voice-overs
What to compare
- Naturalness
- Streaming latency (time to first audio)
- Languages and voices
- Cloning quality
Watch out for
- Subscription-credit pricing makes the effective rate depend on your plan.
- Cloning requires consent from the voice owner.
All 6 APIs, cheapest first
Free to browseTick 2 to 4 APIs to compare them side by side.
| API | $ / 1M chars | Voice cloning | Streaming | Languages | Quality | Price data | Compare |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI TTS (tts-1) OpenAI | $15.00 | No | Yes | 50 | 82 | Verified Oct 4, 2026 · aging | |
| Rime Mist v3 Rime | $30.00 | — | Yes | 8 | – | Verified Oct 6, 2026 | |
| Rime Coda Rime | $50.00 | — | Yes | 8 | – | Verified Oct 6, 2026 | |
| MiniMax Speech MiniMax | $60.00 | Yes | Yes | — | – | Verified Oct 6, 2026 | |
| Sonic Cartesia | $65.00 | Yes | Yes | 15 | 88 | Verified Oct 4, 2026 | |
| ElevenLabs Eleven v3 ElevenLabs | $80.00 | Yes | Yes | 32 | 94 | Verified Oct 4, 2026 · aging |