OpenAI vs Speechify
OpenAI gpt-4o-mini-tts vs SpeechifyAI Simba 3.2 for text-to-speech. TTFA: 775 ms vs 398 ms — edge Speechify Langs: 50 vs 30 — edge OpenAI Computed from public benchmarks with dated sources; updated 2026-08-20.
Head to head
| Axis | OpenAI gpt-4o-mini-tts | SpeechifyAI Simba 3.2 | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $15 per 1M chars* | $10 per 1M chars* | — |
| ELO | — | 1240 | — |
| TTFA | 775 ms | 398 ms | Speechify |
| Langs | 50 | 30 | OpenAI |
| streaming | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| cloning | — | ✓ | — |
* token-/credit-priced — the headline understates real per-unit cost, so no price edge is awarded.
Strengths & caveats
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.SpeechifyHighest-scoring row in this table on the Artificial Analysis Speech Arena (1240 ELO, rank 3 of 99), with low measured latency (398 ms P50 in the Coval capture, 3.4% WER), flat per-character pricing, and streaming, SSML and voice cloning from the entry tier; 50K characters/month free. Plan-bundled pricing: the $10/1M rate is the Starter overage (Pro $8/1M, Scale $6/1M), so effective cost depends on tier and is marked not directly comparable; the 30+ language count is a platform-wide claim rather than a Simba-specific spec, and the production ecosystem is younger than ElevenLabs'.
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