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.

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.

Voxtral Mini TTS is Mistral's text-to-speech model featuring zero-shot voice cloning and multilingual support. It converts text input into natural-sounding audio output.

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.

Orpheus 3B is an English text-to-speech model from Canopy Labs, fine-tuned for natural prosody and expressive delivery. It offers 7 preset voices and is suited for narration, voice assistants, and interactive applications where naturalistic speech is a priority.

CSM 1B is a conversational speech model from Sesame. It accepts text input and produces English speech output, with voice options spanning conversational and read-speech styles. At 1B parameters, it is suited for dialogue-oriented applications such as voice assistants and interactive agents.

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.