Unreal Speech alternative: a cheap TTS API with more voices and languages
Unreal Speech sells text to speech on price: it advertises being much cheaper than ElevenLabs, streams audio quickly and handles long texts. Its weak spots are a small set of voices and languages and no voice cloning yet.
This guide sums up what Unreal Speech says about its API and when the SuperClonica Speech API, or its free offline engine, fits better.
What Unreal Speech offers
According to its site, Unreal Speech streams audio in about 300 ms, returns per-word timestamps and offers several endpoints: a stream of up to 1,000 characters, a request of up to 3,000 characters with an MP3 and timestamps, and asynchronous tasks of up to 500,000 characters for audio of up to ten hours. Its FAQ lists a few dozen voices in fewer than ten languages and says voice cloning is not available yet. Generated audio may be used commercially; on the free plan you must credit Unreal Speech.
What SuperClonica offers
The SuperClonica Speech API streams audio from about 300 ms in our measurements and voices long texts on several workers at once. Every voice speaks 31 languages, the catalog has narrators and game, anime and cartoon characters, and you can train your own voice in the studio and call it by ID. A free key gives 3 minutes of audio a day with no card, and the $5 Starter plan covers up to 216 hours a month.
When Unreal Speech fits better
Choose Unreal Speech if per-word timestamps are central to your app, for example highlighting words as they are read, or if one of its voices already fits your product. Listen to a few voices of each service on your own text before deciding.
When SuperClonica fits better
Choose SuperClonica when you need more languages, character voices, your own voice or the same voices offline: the free engine runs on any CPU with python -m pip install superclonica-cpu, so private texts never leave your machine. Try any voice free on its page with 30 to 100 characters.