Text-to-speech API with voice cloning
Default pickElevenLabs Multilingual v2 / Eleven v3
For voice cloning, ElevenLabs is the most established option: the largest voice library, the most mature instant and professional cloning workflows, and streaming support. Cartesia offers instant and professional cloning on its paid plans and MiniMax supports voice replication, while Google Gemini and OpenAI's gpt-4o-mini-tts do not clone voices. Pricing and quality differ sharply by tier, so check each provider row. A light estimate from provider documentation, August 2026.
DefaultElevenLabs Multilingual v2 / Eleven v3stemklonenElevenLabs Multilingual v2 / Eleven v3
Provider offerings
| Offering | Price ($/1M chars) | ELO | TTFA | Langs | Capabilities |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ElevenLabs Multilingual v2 / Eleven v3ElevenLabs | 100 | 1179 | 653 ms | 29 | streamingcloning |
| Cartesia Sonic 3 / Sonic 3.5Cartesia | 39* | 1203 | 271 ms | 42 | streamingcloning |
| Google Gemini 3.1 Flash TTSGoogle | 12* | 1212 | — | — | streaming |
| OpenAI gpt-4o-mini-ttsOpenAI | 15* | — | 775 ms | 50 | streaming |
| MiniMax Speech 2.5 TurboMiniMax | 78 | — | — | — | streamingcloning |
| Deepgram Aura-2Deepgram | 30 | — | 293 ms | 7 | streaming |
| SpeechifyAI Simba 3.2Speechify | 10* | 1240 | 398 ms | 30 | streamingcloning |
* token-/credit-priced — the headline understates real per-unit cost, so it is excluded from the cheapest ranking.
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