r/TextToSpeech

What is the best tts service and/or model for multilingual input (mostly English with some words in different languages) ? Price is not very important but shouldnt be too expensive compared to alternatives. At the moment I find azure to be the best, amazon polly generative maybe second. Eleven labs seems to be too expensive. Shall I evaluate something else ? The service/model should support lang and/or phoneme tags.

Specifically for phone calls (not web). Curious what people are running and whether latency on actual PSTN calls matched what you saw in testing.
We're currently evaluating and the shortlist is ElevenLabs Turbo, Cartesia, and a couple of smaller ones I've seen mentioned like Gradium. Haven't tested all of them yet, anyone have real experience with any of these specifically on phone calls?

I'm exploring an idea and want to validate the problem before building it.

The concept is:

**Upload a story/script → AI identifies the characters → creates a cast → assigns each character a consistent voice/personality → generates the full audio performance.**

For example, if you upload a screenplay or novel, the system could automatically detect:

* who the characters are * how they speak and behave * which voice fits each character * who is speaking in each scene * how the voice/performance should change with emotion and context

The goal isn't to build another generic TTS tool. The interesting part for me is the **automatic casting + persistent character identity + scene-level performance**.

I'm trying to understand whether this is actually a problem worth solving.

For people who write stories, scripts, fan fiction, RPG campaigns, etc.:

**How do you currently turn your writing into multi-character audio?**

Have you tried tools like ElevenLabs, Gemini TTS, NotebookLM, etc.? What was frustrating or time-consuming?

And most importantly:

**Would an automated “upload → AI casts characters → full-cast audio” workflow actually be useful to you?**

I'd especially like to hear from people who have already tried creating narrated or multi-character audio from their own writing.

like the title says, i want software i can use offline with a dictionary i can customize in any way possible. I'm not that familiar with TTS software but I have used one that allowed me to generate audio that was hours long and I would like something similar.

bonus if it works with bought voices from acapela.

I am looking for a text to speech software that I can Copy and Paste long stories to get a audio file.

The Voice doesn't need to be realistic just a basic robot voice is fine.

I am currently using speechify but its 5 limit is bothering me especially when I don't have access to edit the files afterwards.

I am fine paying for the premium but I want it to be worth it.

If your able to download it so you can listen to it offline that's great if not that's fine as well.

Doesn't have to be a phone app. I'm fine with website only if required.

If there is any other questions I can answer anything to the best of my ability.

The current qwen3 -tts model is the model which is trained around 10 languages, which include these Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian.

In this i want to add telugu as a new language as a part of my experiment and include them to my ai calling agents workfow.Could anyone help me out or guide me or roast me saying does this works or what to do all. i know i have ai but i want some nerds suggesting and guiding me

I’m not very familiar with TTS and want to add voiceovers to videos using text-to-speech. What are people generally using these days? Curious about the differences between open-source and paid options, quality, ease of setup, cost, etc. Any recommendations for a beginner would be appreciated!

Hey everyone,

I'm looking for good TTS voices for YouTube content (mainly pt-BR, but English works too). Since I'm from Brazil, paid tools like ElevenLabs get pretty expensive with the currency conversion, so I'm exploring local options to keep costs down.

My setup:
- 16GB RAM
- RTX 3060 Ti (8GB VRAM)

So...are there any open-source/free TTS models that run well locally on this hardware? I've seen Piper, XTTS v2, Kokoro, and Orpheus mentioned, but not sure which ones are actually worth it.

And...which models give the best quality without sounding too robotic? Don't need real-time, just need natural enough for YouTube.

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I previously built Supertonic, a lightweight TTS model, and I'm now working on a free TTS web app called Airy Studio, aimed at everyday, non-technical users.

I started Airy Studio because developers already have plenty of great options these days, like Qwen-TTS and Kokoro. But most everyday users still have to pay for even basic TTS functionality, which I think should change. (I'm not sure if that holds globally, but it's the case in South Korea, where I'm based.)

I have a research background in TTS, but I'm not a heavy user myself. So I'm wondering what you all think is missing from TTS services right now, or what features you wish existed.

I tried using applio to convert my voice but i suck at voice acting then i used tts build in applio but it sounds like robot with no emotion so should i try to improve my voice acting or aimply find good tts app ?

Note iam broke and iam still learning 3d animation and ai voice i want to make anime character like goku for my animations and the viewers feel like the characters are alive

Hey everyone!

I'm looking for a free and unlimited AI voice/TTS solution, preferably something I can run locally on my PC.

I need it for short crime/psychological documentary-style stories. The most important thing isn't just having a deep male voice — I want the voice to actually feel the story: tension, fear, hesitation, guilt, exhaustion, suspense, etc.

Basically, something that can sound like a person quietly telling you a disturbing story late at night, rather than a typical robotic documentary narrator.

Ideally:

Free and unlimited

Can run locally/offline

Deep male voices

Good emotional expression

Natural pauses, whispers and changes in intensity

Suitable for longer narration

Voice cloning would be a bonus, but isn't necessary

Does anyone know a good open-source/local model for this? I'm also open to ComfyUI workflows or other solutions.

Thanks!

Hi!!

My mom’s illness has caused her to lose her voice & mobility of the left side of her body. I tried to get her the Eyegaze system (where the person types with their eyes) & it was too complicated & kind of unnecessary since she still can use her right hand. She decided that an iPad that will speak what she types is what she wants.

I am looking for an app that she can type what she wants to say & it will say it in her own voice. I have tons of recordings of her talking before she lost her voice, I am hoping there is an app that would allow this.

There aren’t words that can express how much it would mean to us for the text to speak to have her voice. I don’t care how much it will cost.

Any recommendations or ideas are deeply appreciated. Thank you so much.

I'm trying to settle on a local TTS for phone call like back and forth RP.

I've tried several and am having a hard time deciding between them.

I have an RTX 5080 just for the voice pipeline, and am using claude code for setup and optimization in a WSL environment.

Is there a "no brainer choice" or a leaderboard for this use case somewhere?

can anyone suggest TTS or can turn my pdfs into audio that's for free, thanks!

What’s currently the best local voice cloning/dubbing app with support for many languages?

I've used Voice Dream for more than a decade and downloaded Speech Central today to use modern voice tech without needing to sign up for a reoccurring subscription.

After installing it I learned it's not possible to use the new Siri voices with third party apps.

Any recommendations for great quality voices I can install and use with this app?

I tried the Piper TTS ones and they can probably work, but I don't love them.

The best I've heard so far is the Notebook LM/Gemini Notebook synthetic podcaster voices and would love something of that caliber, but that could be saved and used offline.

I'm willing to make one-time voice purchases, but want to avoid reoccurring fees.

I added a Google Cloud API key to use their voices, but the interface seems to crash and I'd like something more reliable and usable offline.

Hello friends .... greetings from Cleveland..... I'm new to ai voice cloning apps ....... Can anyone suggest LOCAL app to create voice-cloned audiobooks ?

PSA for anyone adding voice to their product, especially if you're building for the Indian market where the economics are tighter.

We added a voice feature (support agent + some readback flows). During dev the TTS cost was a rounding error, basically nothing. Shipped it, usage ramped, and within about three weeks the TTS line went from "who cares" to "wait, that's eating our margin." For an India-facing product where per-user revenue is already thin, that hurt more than it would in a US SaaS.

The thing I underestimated: at real conversation volume, TTS is one of your biggest recurring infra costs, and the differences between providers are massive. Not small percentages, we're talking multiples.

What I've learned shopping around:

ElevenLabs is the quality benchmark but the cost is rough at scale. Genuinely the best-sounding, no argument. But once you're running real volume it gets expensive fast, and for an India-market product the math often just doesn't work. It's priced for markets with much higher per-user revenue. Almost everyone I know here starts on it for the quality and then goes hunting for something cheaper the moment usage grows.

The cost gap between providers is huge. The premium providers can be several times more expensive than the newer efficiency-focused ones for the same minutes. At small scale you don't feel it. At real volume it's the difference between the feature being viable or not.

Cheap-but-bad is a false economy though. The catch is a lot of the cheapest options sound robotic or lag, and a voice agent that frustrates users costs you more in churn than you save on TTS. So it's not "cheapest wins," it's "cheapest that's actually good enough on latency and voice quality."

For India specifically, the value equation is different. You need something that's genuinely cost-efficient AND handles how Indian users actually talk AND doesn't lag on Indian telephony. The providers built for efficiency (rather than premium positioning) tend to fit better here, but you have to check they don't cut corners on quality to hit the price.

I won't turn this into a vendor pitch, happy to name what we're testing in comments. But the real question I'm chewing on: at scale, is it worth paying the premium-voice tax for the absolute best quality, or is a cost-efficient option that's 90% as good the smarter call, especially for a price-sensitive market like India?

How are you all handling voice costs? What's your actual cost per minute at volume, and did you find something that's cheap enough without sounding like a 2010 GPS?

I am trying to generate “to sleep to” fact videos and need a reliable, “non-AI” sounding voiceover to narrate it. Obviously this will need a lot of characters per video but tried a few out and can’t get what I want for not a crazy price. Any suggestions?