Where to find Human Sounding Text To Speech?

Last Updated: 

August 5, 2024

Text-to-speech (TTS) technology enables machines to pronounce written words aloud. This functionality has a wide range of uses, including web accessibility, voicebots, and hands-free content consumption. If you're reading this article right now, we don't need to tell you about the advantages of TTS.

Key Takeaways on Finding Natural-Sounding TTS Technology

  1. Quality Matters: The quality of a Text-to-Speech (TTS) voice significantly impacts user experience, especially for lengthy content or interactions with customers. Human-sounding TTS enhances comprehension and engagement.
  2. Customer Interaction: In customer service scenarios, intelligent voice assistants with natural-sounding TTS voices build trust and enhance caller experiences. It is crucial for maintaining reliability and brand engagement.
  3. Web Reading Accessibility: Web readers, aiding users with dyslexia or vision impairments, benefit from TTS with human-like voices. Pronunciation and prosody play a vital role in making online content more accessible through TTS.
  4. Wavel AI: Wavel AI offers over 250 AI voices in 40 languages, providing versatility and quality. Features like voice cloning, voice changing, and efficient content creation make it a leading choice for realistic and customisable TTS.
  5. NaturalReader: NaturalReader offers lifelike TTS voices in 16 languages, focusing on accessibility. While its most natural-sounding voices are behind a paywall, the free version provides reasonably realistic TTS experiences.
  6. Free TTS: Despite its name, Free TTS offers decent voice quality due to Google's TTS engine. However, its prosody may lack naturalness. It provides a free demo and affordable plans for additional usage.
  7. Voicemaker: Voicemaker stands out with nearly human-sounding TTS voices and various performance settings. While many voices are premium, it offers customisation options such as adjusting pauses, pace, volume, and pronunciation formatting.
  8. Uberduck: Uberduck, while intriguing for neural voice cloning, raises ethical concerns with cloned voices of famous and deceased individuals used without apparent permissions. Not recommended for business use.
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Differences in Quality

Not all TTS voices sound especially natural—and human-sounding text to speech leads to better experiences in most circumstances, such as:

  • Listening to lengthy texts. If you listen to the morning newspaper online or with a print-document reader, you probably prefer a lifelike TTS voice. Long sentences can get tedious when delivered by stilted, robotic voices, especially if you aren't used to consuming a lot of content via TTS.
  • Interacting with a company contact.When people call a customer care line or an IT helpdesk, they usually want to speak with a live agent. Intelligent voice assistants (IVAs) are the next best thing—and because they are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, they are extremely useful. However, when IVAs sound artificial, callers lose faith in their abilities. Human-like TTS voices lead to improved caller experiences and more trustworthy brand engagements.
  • Using a web reading service. Internet users with dyslexia, vision impairments, or inadequate literacy may use TTS software known as web readers to absorb online content. Many consumers prefer to listen rather than read. Human-sounding TTS voices offer better pronunciation and genuine prosody. This helps with comprehension and may even be required.

Five Human Sounding Text To Speech Platforms 

1. Wavel AI 

Wavel AI stands out in the realm of Deepfake Voice Generator free, boasting capabilities in over 40 languages and offering more than 250 distinct AI voices. It's recognised for its versatility and quality in creating realistic and natural-sounding voices. Here are some of the key features that make Wavel AI a leading choice:

1. Voice Cloning:

  • Custom Voice Creation: Users can clone any voice with just a small sample of audio, allowing the creation of personalised text-to-speech models.

2. Voice Changer:

  • Versatile Modifications: Wavel AI allows users to alter voices, changing age, gender, or emotional tone to fit various contexts and needs.

3. AI Voice Generator:

  • Efficient Content Creation: Users can quickly generate voiceovers for videos, commercials, e-learning modules, and more, dramatically reducing production time and cost.
  • Customisation and Control: Wavel AI offers extensive control over the voice generation process, including speed, tone, and emphasis, enabling precise customisation to match specific branding or artistic visions.

4. Text To Speech

  • Global Reach: Wavel AI Text To Speech has support for over 40 languages, Wavel AI caters to a diverse global audience. This includes widely spoken languages and less commonly supported dialects, making it a versatile tool for international users.
  • Accurate Pronunciation: Each language is carefully modelled to ensure accurate pronunciation, intonation, and emphasis, delivering a natural listening experience.

5. Wide Variety of Voices:

  • 250+ AI Voices: The platform offers a broad selection of voices, allowing users to choose from different genders, ages, and styles. Whether for a corporate presentation or a character in a story, there's likely a voice that fits the need.
  • Custom Voice Creation: Beyond the pre-existing library, users can clone and create custom voices, offering even greater flexibility and personalisation.

2. NaturalReader

While NaturalReader's most natural-sounding text-to-speech voices are behind a paywall, the free version provides reasonably lifelike TTS in 16 languages, including English. The free plan is billed as an accessibility overlay, with a dyslexia font choice in the text-entry window. NaturalReader provides in-browser TTS, mp3 downloads, and a Chrome extension for reading webpages, emails, PDFs, Google Docs, and Kindle ebooks. Commercial licences are available, allowing access to higher-quality voices starting at $49 per month for one user.

3. Free TTS

With a name like Free TTS, you wouldn't expect it to provide the most human-like voices in the industry—and you'd be correct. The Free TTS demo has decent voice quality due to the use of Google's TTS engine. However, given the unusual prosody—unexpected pauses, poor pitch control—few would mistake these TTS voices for human speakers. That being said, Free TTS lives up to its name, providing up to 6,000 characters of text-to-speech translation per week. Aside from that, you'll pay $6 for 24-hour access to 1 million characters, or $19 for a month's access to 2 million. Use it in your browser or download mp3s.

4. Voicemaker

Voicemaker stands out among free TTS systems in a few ways. It makes nearly human-sounding TTS sounds available to all users (albeit many of these voices are designated "premium," which requires a subscription). It offers a variety of performance settings, including the ability to add pauses, adjust pace, change volume, and format pronunciation for dates, hours, and other items with a single mouse click. You may even adjust the sample rate—that is, the audio quality—from 8,000 Hz to 24,000 Hz, and even higher with a premium (paid) subscription. However, the free edition of Voicemaker is solely for "testing," and if you want to convert more than 250 characters, you must upgrade. Basic plans are $5 per month, while premium plans are $10 per month. 

5. Uberduck

Go see what Uberduck can do, but don't use it for business purposes. Uberduck uses the TalkNet TTS engine and encourages its users to create datasets that mimic the voices of real speakers. Users delivered, delivering synthesised speech based on everyone from Eminem to Cookie Monster from Sesame Street. (It's easy to understand why commercial use is ripe for litigation.) Nonetheless, Uberduck is an intriguing example of neural voice cloning in the hands of a distributed creative community. That is one perspective. Another issue is that Uberduck is a textbook example of terrible TTS ethics, with cloned voices of beloved and deceased individuals such as Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls used without any permits, as far as we can discern. 

Conclusion

To bring Text-To-Speech (TTS) to your website, service, or device, choose a TTS provider that offers human-like TTS voices, ongoing support, control over prosody, a wide variety of human-like TTS voices, languages that match your audience, and custom TTS voices. Choose a provider that updates its speech engine to ensure proper pronunciation, maintains prosody controls, offers a wide variety of voices, and offers top-quality, custom TTS voices for brands and creators. 

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