GUIDE

IVONA voices alternative: what replaced them and what to use now

For years IVONA voices were the ones people installed to make Windows programs, e-book readers and memes talk with a voice that did not sound like a robot. Many still search for them, often to download an old voice pack.

This guide explains what happened to IVONA, why unofficial downloads are a bad idea, and how SuperClonica gives you natural neural voices that run offline on your own computer, free to try.

Browse voices Install the SuperClonica engine

What happened to IVONA

The old desktop voices are no longer offered on the official site, so there is no official way to buy them today.

  • IVONA was a Polish text-to-speech company; its voices were used in desktop programs and in the Kindle Fire.
  • Amazon bought IVONA in January 2013.
  • The official IVONA website now says that Amazon Polly has replaced the IVONA Speech Cloud service.
  • Polly is a cloud service: it needs an AWS account and bills by usage beyond its free tier.

Hear a neural voice free

Open the page of any voice, type a sentence of 30 to 100 characters, choose the language and press Voice it. In a few seconds you can compare a neural voice with what you remember from IVONA, free and with no account.

What changes compared with IVONA

For screen reading, keep the voice of your screen reader; SuperClonica is for making recordings, from a single line to a whole book.

  • Neural voices with natural pauses and intonation, plus narrators, characters and voices trained from a recording.
  • A free engine that runs offline, with no character limit and no account.
  • The same voice speaks 31 languages; Chinese is not supported yet.
  • It is not a Windows SAPI voice: it does not appear in programs that list system voices.

Voice long texts offline

Install the free engine with python -m pip install superclonica-cpu, save your text as book.txt and run superclonica --text-file book.txt --voice M3 --lang en --output book.mp3. Long texts are split at natural pauses and joined into one file, and everything runs on your computer, so nothing is uploaded. On Windows, the same command works in PowerShell once Python is installed.

Avoid unofficial voice downloads

Old IVONA voice packs offered on file-sharing sites and forums are not official copies: their license is unclear and installers from unknown sources can carry malware. Use voices from official sources only. The ten stock voices of Supertonic 3 are free under the OpenRAIL-M license, and catalog voices are bought once from SuperClonica.