Best Text to Speech Software in 2026

ElevenLabs is an AI audio company whose speech synthesis is used for voiceovers, audiobooks, dubbing and conversational agents. Its pricing page lists 74 languages and a credit system in which one character equals one credit on its V2 Multilingual models. Plans run from Free (10,000 credits, about 10 minutes a month) through Starter at US$6, Creator at US$22, Pro at US$99, Scale at US$299 and Business at US$990, with 6 million credits a month, plus a custom Enterprise tier. On its company page ElevenLabs lists a 30 September 2026 update headlined as its valuation increasing to US$22 billion, and names Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ and Sequoia among its backers.

Murf AI offers a browser-based voiceover studio, AI dubbing and text-to-speech APIs. Its Gen2 model is aimed at controllable voiceover generation and its Falcon 2 API at real-time voice agents. The company advertises more than 200 voices and 35+ languages for speech generation, though other sections of its site cite different language counts for dubbing and products. The Falcon TTS API is priced at US$0.01 per minute. The free Studio plan includes 10 minutes of voice generation without a commercial licence; paid plans add commercial rights and team workspaces, with prices listed on the pricing page, which did not render when accessed for this review.

WellSaid is a voiceover studio aimed at corporate training, marketing and product audio. Paid plans allow unlimited generation and charge by download minutes. Starter costs US$19 a month billed monthly (US$10 a month annually) with 20 download minutes a month and commercial rights; Pro costs US$49 monthly (US$33 annually) with 180 minutes and up to 48 kHz audio; and Business costs US$160 per user a month billed annually with team workspaces and Adobe Premiere Pro integration. A free trial with three minutes a month carries no commercial rights. Enterprise adds translation, SSO and SOC 2 reports, and unused minutes do not roll over.

Amazon Polly is the AWS text-to-speech service, billed monthly per character. Standard voices cost US$4 per million characters, Neural voices US$16, Generative voices US$30 and Long-Form voices US$100. The free tier includes 5 million Standard characters a month and, for the first 12 months, 1 million Neural, 500,000 Long-Form and 100,000 Generative characters a month. Polly also returns Speech Marks, timing metadata used to synchronise text highlighting or animation with audio.

Google Cloud Text-to-Speech is Google's speech synthesis API. Its documentation lists several voice families: Chirp 3 HD, a generally available generative family with 30 voices per supported language and streaming support but no SSML; Studio voices, including an experimental two-speaker multispeaker option; and Neural2, WaveNet and Standard voices, which support SSML. WaveNet voices are built on models trained on raw audio of human speech. Pricing is per character and differs by voice family; the pricing page did not display figures in full when accessed for this review, so rates are omitted here.

Azure AI Speech is Microsoft's speech service, covering text-to-speech, speech recognition and translation. Its text-to-speech pricing is divided into Standard neural voices, Neural HD voices, MAI-Voice, Custom Voice (professional voice models trained for a customer, billed for synthesis, training compute and endpoint hosting) and Personal Voice. A free F0 tier includes 0.5 million neural characters a month, and commitment tiers of 80 million, 400 million and 2 billion characters are offered for neural voices. An avatar add-on is billed per minute. Per-character rates were not displayed on the pricing page when accessed.

Speechify is a consumer reading application for listening to documents, PDFs, web pages and scanned printed text. The free plan includes ten basic voices and listening speeds up to 1.5x. Premium costs US$29 a month or US$139 billed yearly and adds more than 1,000 natural voices in 60+ languages, speeds up to 5x, Scan & Listen, AI summaries, cloud-drive integrations and voice typing.

Because it is designed for personal listening, Speechify is used for study, accessibility and productivity rather than for producing licensed voiceover files.

Cartesia develops the Sonic text-to-speech model, listed on its pricing page as Sonic-3.6, which is designed for real-time voice applications and agents. Sonic consumes one credit per character, which Cartesia estimates at roughly 750 to 800 credits per minute of audio. Plans are Free with 20,000 credits a month, Pro at US$5 with 100,000 credits, Startup at US$49 with 1.25 million and Scale at US$299 with 8 million, each with a matching monthly allowance of prepaid agent dollars, plus a custom Enterprise tier.

Descript is a text-based audio and video editor in which recordings are edited by editing their transcript. It includes stock AI voices that can generate narration or patch recorded speech. The free plan provides 60 media minutes a month and limited AI voices; Hobbyist lists 25+ stock voices and 10 hours of media a month, Creator 30 hours, and Business 60+ voices, 40 hours a month and AI speakers in 14 languages. Listed prices are US$24, US$35 and US$65 a month for Hobbyist, Creator and Business, with lower figures shown for annual billing.

NaturalReader, made by NaturalSoft Limited, converts text, PDFs, images, web pages and photographed book pages into audio. It is sold under separate licences: Personal for private listening, Commercial for voiceovers used in videos, e-learning and podcasts, and EDU group or site licences for schools. A free plan is available without a credit card. Prices for the paid licences were not shown on the pages accessible for this review.