Hello there! Text-to-speech has many practical applications, such as podcasts, video voiceovers, and audiobooks. Many of these technologies require you to purchase credits or subscribe to their service. Today, I want to bridge these technologies' cost barrier by introducing a free tool that doesn't have hidden fees or require a credit card to use. I will share my review of the tool below and provide information about similar tools that you might find helpful.

In today’s rundown:

• Review of TextReader AI.

• Free text-to-speech alternatives.

• Paid text-to-speech AI tools.

Read time: 3.5 minutes.

TextReader AI

• Overview: Generate lifelike audio in seconds, ideal for podcasts, video voice-overs, personal greetings, IVR phone systems, and more. You can convert written text to lifelike speech instantly with Text Reader, utilizing high-fidelity TTS WaveNet voices for natural audio output, which is available for download in MP3 format.

• How to use: There are multiple areas you can use text-to-speech technologies. Below are a few examples from the website, but the usage is not limited to just those.

  Simplifying Voice Recording Tasks: Automate and save on voice recording production costs by converting text to audio in seconds, choosing from various voice actors through a user-friendly interface.

  Enhancing Personal Productivity: AI text-to-speech technology enables easy conversion of written notes, blogs, articles, or any content into audio, supporting multitasking and making information accessible for individuals with visual impairments or reading difficulties.

  Creating Personalized Audio Greetings: Generate warm, personalized audio greetings for birthdays, holidays, or special announcements, enhancing the sentiment conveyed compared to text.

  Cost-Effective Commercial Use: Offers an efficient alternative to traditional voiceover production, ideal for engaging clients in promotional materials, augmenting customer service through IVR systems, and creating accessible educational content.

  Global Reach and Accessibility: Supports multiple languages, aiding businesses in tailoring their messaging for a global audience and making learning materials accessible, especially for students with learning differences.

• Pricing: No cost. Completely free. No free trial, free credit BS 💩 

• Why we love it ❤️ : Extremely easy to use, free, variety of languages, decent selection of voices, and decently fast result generation.

• Paid competitor: ElevenLabs, Murf AI.

• Limitations: There’s a limit of 1000 for one generation, which might not be sufficient for some. Voices are not human-like. It’s very obvious this is AI voice, so this might not be useful depending on your use case. Additionally, it's a nitpick, but it will be much better to use if users can also preview the voice. Currently, you have to generate the text to hear the voice.

Check it out here 👉️ link.

Reviews & Results

Let’s review the results so you can decide whether this AI tool is worth your time. (My apology for the weird format, but Beehiv doesn’t allow direct video upload ☹️)

Open-source alternatives

I don’t have many use for speech-to-text tools, but I’m a sucker for free stuff. So if TextReader AI doesn’t work for your use case, for some reason. Check out the following tools that are either free or very low cost.

Suno-ai/bark

• Overview: Bark is a transformer-based text-to-audio model by Suno. It generates realistic speech in multiple languages, music, and sound effects, including nonverbal expressions. It provides access to pre-trained model checkpoints for commercial use.

• Requirements: Tech background and hardware to support running the model.

• Why we love it ❤️ : Natural human-like voices.

Check it out here 👉️ link.

Coqui AI

• Overview: TTS is a library for advanced Text-to-Speech generation.

• Requirements: Tech background and hardware to support running the model.

• Why we love it ❤️ : Include multiple toolings to support text-to-speech, allowing flexibility for training the model.

Check it out here 👉️ link.

Ljpspeech jets model on HuggingFace

• Overview: Open-source model for text-to-speech generation.

• Requirements: Tech background and hardware to support running the model.

Check it out here 👉️ link.

OpenAI Text-to-speech model

• Overview: OpenAI text-to-speech model.

• Requirements: OpenAI API Key. It’s not completely free, but it can at least provide a natural-sounding voice and cost much less than other paid software. It will require a coding background.

Check it out here 👉️ link.

Comparison with paid competitors

Open-source and free tools are great! However, realistically, you get what you pay for, and the biggest drawback I find from these tools is that they don’t have natural human-like voices. If you’re looking for advanced and customized voice generation, including hyper-realistic human voice, paid tools might be your best bet. Here are some well-tested tools for you to explore.

ElevenLabs

• Overview: ElevenLabs creates the most realistic, versatile, and contextually-aware AI audio, providing the ability to generate speech in hundreds of new and existing voices in 29 languages.

• Pricing: Limited free plan with the most expensive plan on the website, $330/month for business.

• Why we love it ❤️: ElevenLabs is, in my humble opinion, one of the best paid AI tools in this space. Not only do they have a variety of toolkits to support text-to-speech ( you can create your own voice or clone your own voice), but they also have a variety of voice selections in multiple languages.

Check it out here 👉️ link.

Murf AI

• Overview: Murf.ai is a text-to-speech tool that utilizes AI to create voiceovers for presentations and videos that sound like a human voice. This tool allows users to avoid hiring a voice artist or using complicated recording equipment. Murf's mission is to simplify voice audio and make high-quality voiceovers easily accessible to everyone.

• Pricing: They provide a free trial with 10 minutes of voice generation time that you can use to explore the Studio and its premium features and test out all our AI voices. However, almost all of the reasonable voices are premium and require $$, so even if you want to test out and download some short scripts, it can be costly.

• Why we love it ❤️: Like ElevenLabs, Murf provides high-quality, natural-sounding voiceover.

Check it out here 👉️ link.

Let me know what other tool you want to be reviewed 🧑‍💻 at [email protected]

That’s a wrap! 🌯

Thank you for reading ❤️I hope you will find these insights useful. Please contact us at [email protected] if you have suggestions, feedback, or anything!