Best Text-to-Speech Models

Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS Preview is a text-to-speech model from Google, and a substantial generational step up from Gemini 2.5 Flash TTS. It takes text input and produces audio output across 70+ languages — nearly 3× the language coverage of its predecessor.

The headline addition is a system of 200+ inline audio tags (e.g. [whispers], [laughs], [excited]) that let developers steer delivery, emotion, and pacing mid-sentence, alongside a "director's chair" workflow in Google AI Studio for defining per-character Audio Profiles and scene-level context. It supports up to two speakers with independent voice and style configuration per speaker, outputs PCM audio at 24 kHz / 16-bit mono, and automatically watermarks all output with SynthID. Context window is 32k tokens.

Kokoro 82M is a lightweight, open-weight text-to-speech model from hexgrad. It converts text to speech across 8 languages (American and British English, Spanish, French, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Chinese) using 54 preset voices organized by language and gender. At 82M parameters, it is well-suited for multilingual TTS deployments where footprint and cost efficiency matter.

Grok Voice TTS 1.0 is a text-to-speech model from xAI. It converts text into spoken audio across 20+ languages with automatic language detection, and offers five built-in voices (Eve, Ara, Rex, Sal, Leo) covering a range of tones. Inline speech tags allow control over pauses, emphasis, pitch, speed, and vocal style. Output is available in MP3, WAV, PCM, μ-law, and A-law formats at sample rates from 8 kHz to 48 kHz, with up to 15,000 characters per request.

MAI-Voice-2 is an expressive text-to-speech model from Microsoft. It is suited for conversational assistants, media narration, accessibility, education, and other long-form voice applications. It supports 15 languages across 18 locales, fine-grained control of tone and delivery, multi-speaker generation, and voice prompting from short audio clips without fine-tuning. The model prioritizes naturalness and expressivity over latency-critical generation.

Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS Flash is Alibaba's fast, cost-efficient text-to-speech model, generating spoken audio from text via the DashScope Speech Synthesizer API.

MiniMax Speech 2.8 Turbo is a text-to-speech model from MiniMax. It is suited for applications that generate spoken audio from text and accepts arbitrary MiniMax voice IDs.

MiniMax Speech 2.8 HD is a text-to-speech model from MiniMax. It is suited for applications that generate spoken audio from text and accepts arbitrary MiniMax voice IDs.

MAI-Voice-2-Flash is a low-latency text-to-speech model from Microsoft for voice agents, assistants, call centers, accessibility, narration, and other interactive applications. It generates expressive 24 kHz mono speech across 15 languages and 18 locales, with fine-grained control over tone and delivery. Voice prompting and cloning require Microsoft-approved access and appropriate speaker consent.

Aura-2 is a multilingual text-to-speech model from Deepgram. It supports Deepgram’s canonical Aura-2 voice catalog for speech synthesis across multiple languages.

Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS Plus is Alibaba's higher-quality text-to-speech model, generating spoken audio from text via the DashScope Speech Synthesizer API.