A Speechify alternative that works offline
Speechify is a popular text-to-speech reading app: it reads documents, web pages and books aloud on your phone, in the browser and on the computer, with a free plan and a paid Premium subscription. SuperClonica solves a different problem: it turns text into audio files on your own computer, with voices you keep.
This page compares the two honestly, says when Speechify is the better choice, and shows how to listen to and save text with SuperClonica.
Two different tools
The question is not which one is better, but whether you want to listen in an app or to get audio files.
- Speechify: a reading app that speaks text as you read along, synced across your devices.
- SuperClonica: a catalog of voices and a free engine that writes speech to MP3, WAV, FLAC or OGG files on your computer.
- SuperClonica has no phone app and no browser extension; the free online test works in any browser.
- SuperClonica voices speak 31 languages; Chinese is not supported yet.
When Speechify is the better choice
If you mainly want to listen to web pages, PDFs and e-mails on your phone, with the text highlighted as it is read and your place saved across devices, a reading app such as Speechify is the more convenient tool. SuperClonica does not try to be one.
When SuperClonica fits better
The same voice file works in scripts, games and apps through the engine and its Python API.
- You want files to keep, edit, send or publish: an MP3 of an article, a lecture, a story.
- Your text is private: the engine runs offline, and nothing is sent to a server.
- You want character voices, narrators or a voice trained from your own recording.
- You prefer no subscription: the engine is free, and catalog voices are bought once.
Listen to a text with SuperClonica
On the page of any voice, paste a phrase of 30 to 100 characters and press Voice it to hear it for free, with no account. For whole texts, install the free engine with python -m pip install superclonica-cpu, save the text as a file and run superclonica --text-file article.txt --voice F2 --lang en --output article.mp3. Long texts are split at natural pauses and joined into one file; on an ordinary desktop processor an hour of audio takes several minutes.
What it costs
The SuperClonica engine and the ten stock voices of the model are free, with no character limit, and several catalog voices are free too. Other voices are bought once, with no subscription, and stay yours as a JSON file. Speechify’s Premium is a subscription; check its current price on its own site before you compare.