Google vs OpenAI
Google Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS vs OpenAI gpt-4o-mini-tts for text-to-speech. Computed from public benchmarks with dated sources; updated 2026-08-20.
Head to head
| Axis | Google Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS | OpenAI gpt-4o-mini-tts | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $12 per 1M chars* | $15 per 1M chars* | — |
| ELO | 1212 | — | — |
| TTFA | — | 775 ms | — |
| Langs | — | 50 | — |
| streaming | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| cloning | — | — | — |
* token-/credit-priced — the headline understates real per-unit cost, so no price edge is awarded.
Strengths & caveats
GoogleHighest-scoring row in this table on the Artificial Analysis Speech Arena (1212 ELO, rank 5 of 99), combined with a low effective per-character cost. Token-based pricing (unchanged at $1/1M input text tokens + $20/1M audio output tokens, billed at 25 audio tokens per second); the ~$12/1M-chars figure is a third-party conversion estimate, not a provider per-character rate, so vergelijkbaar=false. Still labelled a Preview model on Google's own pricing page, with more restrictive rate limits. No independent TTFA: Gemini TTS is absent from the Coval benchmark, where Google appears only as chirp-3-hd at 484ms P50. No native voice cloning.OpenAICheap, developer-friendly, with steerable tone/emotion via a free-text 'instructions' parameter and tight integration into the OpenAI stack; ~11-13 built-in voices. Token-based pricing (unchanged at $0.60/1M text input tokens + $12/1M audio output tokens); the ~$15/1M-chars figure is a community estimate, so vergelijkbaar=false — note OpenAI's older tts-1 is separately listed at a real $15/1M characters, which is easy to confuse with it. Not ranked on the Arena: gpt-4o-mini-tts does not appear among the 99 leaderboard models, where OpenAI is represented only by tts-1, tts-1-hd and GPT-Realtime-2. Independent Coval TTFA is 775ms P50, the slowest in this table apart from ElevenLabs Multilingual v2. The ~50-language claim is vendor-stated and was not re-verified in this refresh. No voice cloning.
Sources
- SpeechifyAI — API pricing (TTS tiers)2026-08-20
- Artificial Analysis — Text to Speech Leaderboard (Speech Arena provider-voice, blind-vote ELO, 99 models)2026-08-20
- Coval — TTS benchmark data (TTFA P50/P95 and WER, rolling 7-day window on a pinned dataset), mirrored with methodology notes by Openbenchmarks; pulled 2026-08-20 06:30 UTC2026-08-20
- Coval — Best TTS Providers 2026 guide (successor to the 2026-05-04 benchmark post; now carries vendor-claimed latencies only, no benchmark table)2026-08-20
- ElevenLabs — API Pricing2026-08-20
- Cartesia — Pricing2026-08-20
- Google — Gemini Developer API Pricing2026-08-20
- OpenAI — API Pricing (developers.openai.com; the former openai.com/api/pricing/ URL now returns 403)2026-08-20
- MiniMax — Product Pricing (API docs)2026-06-22
- Deepgram — Pricing (Aura-2 and Flux TTS)2026-08-20
- Deepgram — TTS model docs (Aura-2 language list)2026-08-20
- MarkTechPost — Cartesia ships Sonic-3.6 (launch date, beta/API-only status)2026-08-20