Posted on September 27, 2020 at 10:50 pm
I needed to add voice-over to a video tutorial, so I was looking for text-to-speech web services with realistic human voices and accents, that could help me to auto-translate a few phrases and export them into MP3 audio file, to easily insert them in the video timeline.
Here is what I have found:
1. TTSMP3.com
TTSMMP3.com is so far the best free (and paid) text-to-speech converter, it is very easy to use and it offers also affordable paid plans in case you need to convert more than 3,000 characters. It also supports breaks/pauses (in seconds), emphasizing words, changing of speed, pitch and whisper (supported SSML tags). It uses Amazon Polly for the TTS processing.
* Best English voice: US English / Matthew
2. Kurakella
Kurakella text-to-speech converter is another good service I have used in various video tutorials, what is nice about this service is that it uses text-to-speech cloud services from various providers, including Amazon Polly, Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services, Google Text-to-Speech API, and IBM Watson Text to Speech (TTS). This is very good because there are many voices to choose from, and with the monthly paid plan you can unlock also premium voices (Neural for Azure or WaveNet for Google) that are more realistic than basic ones.
* Best English voice: (Microsoft) Guy B. – En – US (paid plan)
Kurakella Text-to-Speech Converter
3. Wideo
Wideo Text to Speech is another very good web service that you can use to convert text to speech (MP3) easily from your web browser. Personally I have found that the English voices “[en-US] Mike Stevens -S” (tag is en-US-Standard-D) and “[en-US] -S” (tag is en-US-Standard-I) are very realistic and I have used them in a few video tutorials with success. Looks like the service is using Google Text to Speech API to convert text to MP3.
BONUS TIP
During my personal tests, I have found that the voices “Guy (Neural) – Male” and “Amy (Neural) – Female” from Microsoft Azure Text to Speech service are the most realistical ones. Additionally, selecting voice style as “Customer Support” made it perfect for my video tutorials. It also supports many Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) tags.
Microsoft Azure Text to Speech
Cognitive-Speech-TTS PHP
On Google Text-to-Speech API I have found that the English voices “en-US-Wavenet-C – Female”, “en-US-Wavenet-J – Male”, “en-US-Standard-I – Male”, “en-US-Standard-D – Male” are the most realistical ones. But there are definitely others, you need to test them to find out which one works good for your project. Here are some nice Google TTS PHP examples:
Official Google Text to Speech API PHP
Simplified Google Text to Speech API PHP
Official API documentation
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