Top 10 Best Text to Speech APIs & Alternatives (2021)

Learning new languages can be challenging, especially where different languages require certain pronunciations. Buying books help you to write, but how do you communicate one-on-one with another person for practice?

Today with text to speech APIs, we can transform the contents of an eBook, blog, or article into speech by touching a screen or click of a button. Companies can now automate their customer service to become more conversational. Tutors can assist their students in learning to read quickly and faster.

E-commerce platforms can recognize what customers want without having to type. Browsers can identify voice and do searches with pinpoint accuracy. Robots also use the TTS API to read-aloud texts. There is a vast window of opportunities and functionalities presented by the text to speech API in our daily endeavors.

What is the best text to speech API?

After reviewing all the text to speech APIs, we found these 10 APIs to be the very best and worth mentioning:

• IBM Watson API
• Rev.ai API
• Speechmatics API
• Google Speech-to-text API
• Robomatic.ai API
• Amazon Polly API
• Voicepods API
• Dialog Flow API
• Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services API
• Ispeech API

Top 10 Best Text to Speech APIs

1. IBM Watson

IBM Watson API design allows it to evaluate and generate a response formula and understand complex speech context. It can recognize and differentiate various speakers, making it suitable for transcription.

Benefits

It is easy to set up and with good user experience.It can process structured data and give relevant data.

It has a free limited package. Other charges start from $0.02/Minutes for unlimited minutes and 100 transcriptions.

Popularity Score: 0.2/10

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Best ForPhonetic translations in multiple languages, dialects, and voice

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2. Rev.ai

Benefits

The accuracy of the Rev.ai API allows users to get the best text to speech services. Some of the merits include: email and chat support and can handle different media types.

The first five hours of use are free and $0.035 for every minute.

Popularity Score: 6.8/10

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Best For Audio and video transcriptions

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3. Speechmatics

The Speechmatics text to speech API is cloud-based used for text transcription. It accommodates a broad range of formats and can process files offline. It also supports multiple languages, including Australian English.

Benefits

Its benefits include ease of use, and it can perform both private use tasks and cloud-based transcription services with a single API. It is excellent for noisy audio.

The needs of the user determine the price ranges. The quotation is done upon request to include the features you prefer.

Popularity Score: N/A - /10

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Best For Speech recognition and audio transcriptions in the English language

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4. Google Speech-to-text

The API is an excellent tool for short web searches. Its accuracy and the ability to distinguish various learning models make the API stand out from the rest.

Benefits

The benefits of the API include: data privacy, noise cancellation can automatically recognize the language and support more than 120 languages.

The API is ordinarily free for audios that are less than sixty minutes. However, longer audios prices go for $0.006 for fifteen seconds.

Popularity Score: N/A - /10

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Best For Detecting machine learning models in a speech to text applications

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5. Robomatic.ai

The API is mainly useful in teaching, training, and self-education.

Benefits

Among the benefits is the ease of integration with web, IoT, web, and desktop applications. It handles different time zones with multilingual support for users.

The API has been long available for software developers. However, actual prices for the features are not in the public domain, and one has to contact the software supplier for inquiries and purchases.

Popularity Score: 9.4/10

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Best For Talking robots and bots in the customer service industry

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6. Amazon Polly

Amazon Polly is a cloud-based deep learning service for speech recognition.

Benefits

The main features are ease of use, supports for over 34 international languages and their variants. It has a wide range of voices that you can select. It supports MP3, Vorbis, and raw PMC audio formats and allows adjustments of tones, speech rate, pitch, and loudness.

It has a free tier of 5million characters per month and a pay-as-you-go model priced at $4 per million characters. For neural voices, the price is $16 per million characters.

Popularity Score: N/A - /10

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Best For Newscaster narrations and telephony applications

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7. Voicepods

Voicepod is an excellent tool for converting text to speech on the web. It features 24 voices and nine foreign languages, an expressive editor that allows customization of audio output. The multispeaker feature allows the selection different voices for various paragraphs on the same pod.

Benefits

You can upload any images or files for conversion. Converted audio files can be shared on social networks or embedded on websites in MP3 format.

Lite plan is free for five conversions/month. Starter and premium package cost $9 and $20 for 20 and 100 conversions per month, respectively.

Popularity Score: N/A - /10

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Best For Reading text from webpages and blogs

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8. Dialog Flow

Dialogflow from Google can analyze speech and put it into context. The API has inbuilt analytics useful in bringing investors, developers, and sales teams together on the same page or platform.

Benefits

The API benefits include easy to set up, integration with multiple software and non-Google devices such as Alexa and other web services. The API is free for use.

Popularity Score: N/A - /10

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Best For Integrating context when analyzing speech for accurate transcription

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9. Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services

The ability to provide solutions for many text and speech-based problems ranks among the top text to speech APIs.

Benefits

The API enables software to accommodate specific speech styles from users and has an additional custom vocabulary, which is an added advantage.

Features include transcribing and translation in real-time, data privacy, and text conversion to speech in natural speech.

This API is free.

Popularity Score: N/A - /10

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Best For Apps and services using multiple languages and variants

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10. Ispeech

Ispeech features position markers that mark the words as spoken on TTS audio. Support multiples languages.

Benefits

Its Visemes feature positions word with mouth movements in videos. It supports Math markup language (MathML) and Speech synthesis markup language (SSML).

Its pricing is pay-as-you-go starting with $50 for 2000 credits for web or mobile use. Otherwise, mobile installations are charged, starting from $2,500 for 10000 installations.

Popularity Score: N/A - /10

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Best For Book translations into audio

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