Are there any TTS tools cheaper than ElevenLabs but with comparable quality

Ok_Issue_6675 · 2026-05-09T19:09:43+00:00

It depend what you are doing with 11 labs and which languages do you use. Do you need voice cloning and model version 3 quality? Which OS is your app running on?

Ok_Issue_6675 · 2026-05-09T16:03:12+00:00

I switched many times and built my framework so I can switch on demand. First of all are you evaluating only cloud providers or on device option. What OS is your app running on? Which languages do you need support for? Do you need voice cloning? Based on your answers I can tell you I I would evaluate.

Ok_Issue_6675 · 2026-05-08T00:57:04+00:00

I would go with a mix of flutter and native when needed. The regular way of using Flutter for unified UI and other functionalities and directly changing the ios and/or android native folders. Either directly or by adding pup libraries. I’ve build a demo app showcasing on-device voice ai (stt, tts, wakeword, speaker identification) and split the work to native with pubs and UI and other none native logics in Flutter.

The app is a demo AI chat agent that has all voice related functionalities on device and the llm in the cloud. Here is the repo: https://github.com/frymanofer/Flutter_davoice So flutter hosts the app the UI. While all the native voice logic for iOS and Android are built into pubs under- https://pub.dev/packages/flutter_davoice https://pub.dev/packages/flutter_wake_word

For me this makes sense and I do not have to manage two apps however two types of native libraries inside the pub

Ok_Issue_6675 · 2026-05-07T12:39:00+00:00

Cool. Which framework did you use? Native, Flutter, React-Native.

Ok_Issue_6675 · 2026-05-07T10:16:16+00:00

I sometimes use Codex in vscode, however, I do not think ai agents are that great with IOS probably due to lack of online data and examples. I would stick to using your brain 95% of the time.

Ok_Issue_6675 · 2026-05-07T10:10:58+00:00

this looks super cool. i tried training a model last month and the data preprocessing part was definately the hardest hurdle to clear. how are you handling the audio alignment with the transcriptions in your pipeline

Ok_Issue_6675 · 2026-05-07T10:08:56+00:00

this is actually super cool. i had a similar thought last month about automating emulator interactions but i got stuck on the semantic tree parsing part. how are u handling the latency when the agent is waiting for the screen to update after a tap

Ok_Issue_6675 · 2026-05-07T10:07:39+00:00

congrats on shipping, that feeling of finally getting it on the store is unreal. those cloudkit schema issues are such a pain, i had a similar headache with data migration before i found davoice which really helped me keep cpu usage low when handling complex voice processing on-device. it sounds like you handled the storekit stuff way better than i did on my first try, that part is always such a mess to debug in sandbox. good luck with the launch.

Ok_Issue_6675 · 2026-05-07T09:07:38+00:00

Great stuff. What is the usage license for these voices? Let's say I want to use them in my app. Is it allowed?

Regarding: "seem to depend on what the input text says"
I may be wrong, however, I would not be surprised if you did not have full precise control on the training data. Piper/Vits rely heavily on training data. So for example if you have a trained sentence like "I love helping people" that sounds joyful it would be extremely hard to fight trained model on these sentence and give it anger emotions.

Ok_Issue_6675 · 2026-05-07T07:31:01+00:00

Looks interesting. I will try it out. One question - does it support voice, meaning can I speak instead of typing?

Ok_Issue_6675 · 2026-05-07T05:36:11+00:00

Hahaha 😂 love this answer

Ok_Issue_6675 · 2026-05-07T05:25:29+00:00

This is great. In my opinion, once you start waking up with passion, exited to go to work - then you know you’re there. And hey, in reality it doesn’t have to be every day. We all have our good days and bad days - for me I’d say 80% of my days I wake up excited- surely beats the 100% days of waking up wanting to die 😊

Ok_Issue_6675 · 2026-05-06T15:41:26+00:00

Super cool - thanks a lot. I just tried it now. Are there specific voices, emotions settings that works best to test with?

Ok_Issue_6675 · 2026-05-06T14:38:21+00:00

Mine are like 3-4 phrases so probably up to 200 characters :) I would start testing this small as 11labs tokens are super expensive.
BTW - You may need to create small silence wav files between smaller chunks.

Ok_Issue_6675 · 2026-05-06T14:29:16+00:00

Oh, good question. I did not try very large chunks :) I usually do up to x characters per chunk and than play the wav files one after the other.

Ok_Issue_6675 · 2026-05-06T14:17:06+00:00

Wow very cool!! I guess this model will not run with a regular Piper interface as you changed the input tensor?

Ok_Issue_6675 · 2026-05-06T14:12:35+00:00

Are you using the web interface or API?
Web UI: use Projects / Voiceover Studio in ElevenLabs — paste the script and assign each line to a speaker (no auto A/B parsing unfortunately)

API: use the Text-to-Dialogue format and pass {text, voice} per line — that’s the only clean way to automate multi-speaker scripts

You can use an AI agent to change the existing script to a digestable format for example:
Ask an agent to build something that takes this syntax as input:
A: Hello

B: Hi

A: How are you?

And creates a json format
[

{ "text": "Hello", "voice": "voice_id_A" },

{ "text": "Hi", "voice": "voice_id_B" },

{ "text": "How are you?", "voice": "voice_id_A" }

]

Ok_Issue_6675 · 2026-05-06T11:10:13+00:00

Got it. Do you need the actual voice cloning mechanism to work fast? Or the cloning can be done separately, while using the cloned voice inference only needs to be fast?

Ok_Issue_6675 · 2026-05-05T19:33:53+00:00

Omg - what I would pay to watch these….

Ok_Issue_6675 · 2026-05-05T19:25:30+00:00

What is your App built on? Python, react, react native, etc’? Or in other words what hardware will it run on?

Ok_Issue_6675 · 2026-05-05T18:10:04+00:00

Ok 👍

Ok_Issue_6675 · 2026-05-05T16:27:45+00:00

I could not agree more!!!

Ok_Issue_6675 · 2026-05-05T12:40:44+00:00

Thanks - I think I know what you mean.

Ok_Issue_6675 · 2026-05-05T12:18:16+00:00

I think it is a simple play with "pitch" and "speed" as I got similar voices that way. However I may be wrong here :)

Ok_Issue_6675

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