I have been using many text to speech services in the past years and their quality has improved a lot lately. There are many different services free, cheap or expensive. Most of companies offer a basic free service and a paying upgrade to have more voices, longer texts, commercial licenses. But before discovering which is the best natural text to speech software in 2020, let’s see what are the factors to consider.
Factors to check
Supported Languages
The most common language is english, but if you need support of another language you must carefully read the specifications. Often the quality is good for English while it can be much lower for other less common languages.
It is also worth noting that the English language is often offered with different accents, pronunciations, voices, while other languages are proposed with limited variety, most often just one male and one female version.
Type of license
Most text to speech companies offer 2 levels of license: Personal and Commercial.
Usually the personal license allows you to use the audio you have created in your personal videos. Audio files created with the personal versions usually cannot be used publicly (including on websites or YouTube videos). For instance you are creating an explainer video of a product you are producing but you will not probably be allowed to put this video on your website for your own customers.
The Commercial license is instead compulsory if you want your audio/video out there for the public. If you are for instance a media agency and you want to create audio to be sold to your clients, you will need this. In most cases, You will need this also if you just want to publish your videos on youtube.
Text Limitations
Usually the free versions have limitation on the duration of the audio or the number of words to be read, while the paying version have wider possibilities or even no limit.
List of Best Natural Text To Speech software in 2020
Newscaster vocalizer
NewsCaster Vocalizer is one of my personal favourites. If you are a youtuber looking for a commercial license I think this is the most valuable option out there, as they offer the commercial license for 9$ per month or for 69$ per year.
They currently support: English (US), Chinese, Mandarin, Danish, Dutch, English (Australian), English (British), English (Indian), English (Welsh), French, French (Canadian), German, Hindi, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (European), Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Spanish (Latin American), Spanish (Mexican), Swedish, Turkish, Welsh.
Notevibes
Notevibes is an online text to speech converter with 157 natural sounding voices at 18 languages. Powerful voice editor for speech customization. They propose a personal license at a very low price (currently 7$), but the commercial license is much more expensive.
NaturalReaders
Natural Readers offer a free limited subscription where you can have private use of 20 minutes per day of premium voices, an upgraded cheap version with more voices but still limited to private use, and a pretty expensive commercial license, starting at 49$/Month.
TTSMP3
TTSMP3 is a very basic website offering 3000 characters per day for free. If you want more, you have to get in touch with them to get access to the premium version. Their service is based, as many others, on Amazon Polly webservices.
