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The best AI tools for text to speech and voice cloning in 2026

Text to speech has reached the point where listeners rarely notice, and several options clone a voice from a short sample. Pick on expressiveness, latency for live calls, language coverage and whether you need to run it on your own hardware.

By Andrew Miller and Sheela · Updated Oct 26, 2026 · How we review

How we chose: each pick is a product, model or project we have reviewed that does this job according to our review of it, ranked by our rating out of 5. We take no affiliate commission.

Also ranked: the best text-to-speech models

  1. 1

    AI Tools: Audio & voice

    ElevenLabs

    Nobody else in AI speech sells this much quality across this many products, and nobody charges as much per character for it.

    Best for: Creators, publishers and developers who need the highest-quality AI voices or real-time voice agents.

    Price: Free 10k credits/month; Starter $6/month; Creator $22/month; Pro $99/month; Scale $299/month; Business $990/month; Enterprise custom. Annual billing gives 2 months free.

    Read our ElevenLabs review
    4.8/5
  2. 2

    AI Models: Text to speech

    Eleven v4 and v4 Turbo

    Nothing on the public leaderboards sounds better, but Google's Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS gets within 60 Elo points for about a fifth of v4's price.

    Best for: Audiobook, game and dubbing producers who need the most expressive voices, and voice-agent teams who want top-ranked quality at Turbo's lower rate.

    Price: API: v4 $0.08 and v4 Turbo $0.04 per 1,000 characters. Subscriptions from Starter $6/month to Business $990/month include character allowances.

    Read our Eleven v4 and v4 Turbo review
    4.7/5
  3. 3

    AI Models: Text to speech

    Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS

    Fifth in blind votes at under half Eleven v4 Turbo's price, Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS is a bargain with an expiry date of 1 January.

    Best for: Developers producing long-form narration or multilingual dubbing who want near-top quality and can absorb January's price rise.

    Price: Flash TTS: $0.50 per 1M text tokens in, $9 per 1M audio tokens out (about $0.81 per hour of audio) until 31 Dec 2026, doubling on 1 Jan 2027. Flash-Lite: $6 per 1M audio tokens out. Batch half price; free tier in AI Studio.

    Read our Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS review
    4.5/5
  4. 4

    AI Models: Text to speech

    Cartesia Sonic 3.6

    Sonic 3.6 closed most of the gap to ElevenLabs in one release and costs less per character than Eleven v4, but it trains on customer content unless you opt out.

    Best for: Teams building production voice agents that want stable, versioned voices at a moderate price.

    Price: Free plan 20K credits/month (no commercial licence); Pro $5 (100K), Startup $49 (1.25M), Scale $299 (8M); overage $38 to $65 per 1M credits. One credit is one character, about 750 to 800 per minute of audio.

    Read our Cartesia Sonic 3.6 review
    4.4/5
  5. 5

    GitHub Repos: Run models locally

    audio.cpp

    audio.cpp is doing for local speech what llama.cpp did for chat models, and four months in it already runs more than 110 model families.

    Best for: Engineers who self-host several speech or audio models and want one native runtime and HTTP API instead of a Python environment per model.

    Price: Free under Apache 2.0. No paid edition. Model weights keep their own licences, many of them non-commercial.

    Read our audio.cpp review
    4.3/5
  6. 6

    AI Tools: Audio & voice

    Speechify

    A capable reader for people who must listen rather than read, sold at a monthly price that only makes sense if you never pay it.

    Best for: Students and professionals who want to listen to their reading on a phone or computer every day.

    Price: Free plan with 10 basic voices up to 1.5x speed; Premium $29/month, or $139/year billed yearly. API free for 500K characters/month, then $10, $99 or $499/month. Studio and audiobooks billed separately.

    Read our Speechify review
    4.1/5
  7. 7

    AI Models: Text to speech

    OmniVoice

    OmniVoice is the open TTS model to reach for when the language is not on anyone else's list, provided your lawyer reads the tokenizer licence.

    Best for: Developers who need open, self-hosted speech in languages the commercial and open leaders do not cover.

    Price: Free weights; code under Apache 2.0, audio tokenizer under the Boson Higgs Audio 2 Community License (expanded licence needed above 100,000 annual active users).

    Read our OmniVoice review
    4.0/5
  8. 8

    AI Models: Text to speech

    Kokoro-82M

    Nothing this small sounds this good, but it has had no updates since August 2025, so treat it as finished software rather than a project that will improve.

    Best for: Developers who need cheap, permissively licensed speech for narration, accessibility or prototypes.

    Price: Free under Apache 2.0. Hosted at $0.65 per million characters on Replicate (via Artificial Analysis), the cheapest on its leaderboard, and $0.99 on DeepInfra.

    Read our Kokoro-82M review
    3.9/5
  9. 9

    AI Models: Text to speech

    Chatterbox

    Chatterbox is the open voice cloner a compliance team can sign off, thanks to its watermark, though not the one a listener would choose.

    Best for: Teams that need commercially usable open voice cloning with provenance marking and can accept mid-table voice quality.

    Price: Free under the MIT licence. Artificial Analysis lists hosted Chatterbox at $25 and Resemble's Chatterbox HD at $40 per million characters.

    Read our Chatterbox review
    3.7/5

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