AI Text-to-Speech turns written text into expressive spoken audio across 7 production-grade models — xAI, MiniMax, Inworld and Alibaba's Qwen3 (with voice cloning). The model picker matters: each one has its own voice catalog, language coverage, character limit, and per-1k-character price, and the first audible difference is usually intonation more than accent.
Pick the right model
Speech models
- xAI TTS — 6 voices, 20+ languages, supports inline
<pause>/<emphasis>tags - Inworld TTS 2 — conversational model built for realtime voice interaction; this tool exposes its English voice roster
- Inworld Max / Mini — 75 named voices, expressive narration; Mini is cheaper and faster
Specialty models
- MiniMax Speech 2.8 — 300+ voices, language strongly biased via the language boost setting
- Qwen3 CustomVoice — 9 preset Alibaba voices with style control
- Qwen3 Base — voice cloning from a 3-second clip
Voice cloning with Qwen3 Base
Qwen3 Base needs a 3–30 second reference clip. Two operating modes:
ICL mode (with transcript)
Provide both the audio clip and the exact transcript of what is said in it. Higher similarity, more natural prosody. Best for production work where the source clip is clean and you have the script handy.
x-vector mode (audio only)
Leave the transcript field empty. The model relies on a speaker embedding only — quicker to set up, but the clone is less faithful and may drift on long outputs. Good for quick experiments.
Inline tags worth remembering
xAI TTS honors inline tags inside the text, for example:
Welcome to the observatory. <pause time="600ms"/> The comet streaks across the sky like a silver flame, <emphasis level="strong">brilliant</emphasis> and brief.
What drives the bill
All TTS models in this catalog charge per 1,000 input characters. The displayed price tag on the model picker is the per-1k rate; total cost scales linearly with text.length. A few practical implications:
- Pasting a 20,000-character chapter costs ~20× a 1,000-character paragraph on the same model.
- The credit hold is sized to the text length you submit — short prompts hold a small reservation; long ones reserve more, and the final settlement matches what the provider actually charged.
Reading back the output
The download button on each result respects the format you selected (MP3 / WAV / FLAC / OGG) and tags the filename accordingly. History entries also remember the format that produced them, so re-downloading an older clip will not silently change the extension.