Speechify vs Unreal Speech

Speechify transforms written text into natural-sounding audio, helping users listen to books, articles, PDFs, and web pages across devices. It supports over 1,000 AI voices in 60+ languages, including voice cloning to create personalized narrations. The platform offers adjustable reading speeds up to 4.5x, synchronized text highlighting, and AI-powered features like summaries and quizzes to boost comprehension. Speechify's AI dubbing tool enables users to localize videos into multiple languages with humanlike voices, expanding global reach. Available on iOS, Android, Mac, Chrome, Edge, and web, it suits students, professionals, and those with reading challenges like dyslexia or ADHD. The service also provides an API for developers and enterprise solutions with team collaboration and extensive media libraries. Speechify prioritizes ethical AI use and data privacy with SOC 2 Type II compliance and end-to-end encryption, making it a trusted tool for accessible and efficient audio content creation.

Unreal Speech offers an affordable text-to-speech API that delivers high-quality voice synthesis at a fraction of the cost of major competitors. It uses the Kokoro TTS engine, an efficient open-source model with just 82 million parameters, enabling fast and natural speech generation. The API supports streaming audio in as little as 300 milliseconds and can produce long-form audio up to 10 hours in length, making it suitable for real-time applications and extensive content creation.

The platform targets developers, content creators, and businesses looking for a cost-effective, production-ready TTS solution. It supports 48 distinct voices across 8 languages including English, French, Hindi, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Italian, and Portuguese, with multiple accents and speaking styles. Users benefit from features like per-word timestamps, which allow synchronization of text and speech for enhanced accessibility and interactive applications.

Unreal Speech's value proposition centers on drastically reducing text-to-speech costs—up to 11 times cheaper than Eleven Labs and significantly more affordable than Amazon, Microsoft, and Google offerings. This makes it an attractive choice for startups, educators, and enterprises aiming to scale voice applications without high expenses.

Technically, the Kokoro TTS model combines elements of StyleTTS 2 and iSTFTNet in a streamlined decoder-only architecture. This design eliminates the need for separate vocoders or complex multi-stage pipelines, resulting in faster synthesis without sacrificing audio quality. The model generates 24kHz high-fidelity audio efficiently, suitable for both batch processing and real-time streaming.

Users can access the API with a free tier offering 250,000 characters monthly, and scale up with volume-based pricing plans. Additionally, Kokoro TTS can be self-hosted via Python packages or command-line tools, providing flexibility for offline or privacy-sensitive applications.

Overall, Unreal Speech stands out by combining open-source innovation with enterprise-grade API reliability, making advanced text-to-speech technology accessible and affordable for a wide range of use cases.