The best text-to-speech models in 2026
The best text-to-speech models right now are Eleven v4 and v4 Turbo, Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Cartesia Sonic 3.6, out of 6 we have reviewed. Each is ranked by our rating, with its price, our verdict and who it suits.
Updated Oct 23, 2026 · Ranked from our reviews · How we review
- 1
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 review4.7/5 - 2
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 review4.5/5 - 3
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 review4.4/5 - 4
Nothing this small sounds this good, but mid-table quality, preset voices and a model unchanged since January 2025 cap its ambitions.
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 review3.9/5 - 5
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 review3.7/5 - 6
Qwen3-TTS hands developers fine-grained voice controls and a three-second cloning tool with no guardrails, at a quality listeners rank near the bottom.
Best for: Developers building multilingual voice features who want fine control under a permissive licence and will add their own safeguards.
Price: Free under Apache 2.0. Alibaba Model Studio (Singapore): qwen3-tts-flash $0.10 and qwen3-tts-flash-realtime $0.13 per 10,000 input characters, with a 90-day free quota.
Read our Qwen3-TTS review3.5/5