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ElevenLabs burst onto the scene in 2022 as one of the most advanced and realistic-sounding AI voice cloning and text-to-speech services available. However, the advanced features come at a price: ElevenLabs has tiered pricing models that can be expensive for large amounts of voice cloning or speech synthesis. For those who want to explore elflabs’ free alternatives, there are a few options to consider.
See more: How to use Deep Dream Generator AI?
What is ElfLabs?
First, let’s briefly summarize the main capabilities of ElevenLabs:
- Voice cloning – Upload samples of anyone speaking to create a custom voice clone that can generate new speech that sounds like that person.
- Text to speech – Enter any text you want and convert it to natural-sounding speech using a wide selection of standard voices.
- Imitating prosody – Advanced intonation, rhythm and stress patterns to make speech sound more human.
- Real-time speech generation – Low-latency API for integrating voice directly into apps and services.
ElevenLabs delivers extremely high-quality and accurate speech cloning and speech synthesis. However, prices start at $49 per month for low volumes and go up from there.
Now let’s explore some free alternatives that offer subsets of these capabilities.
ElevenLabs Free Alternatives
Tortoise TTS – Open source voice synthesizer
Turtle TTS is an open-source neural text-to-speech engine that you can self-host for free. Some important aspects:
- High quality voices generated using deep learning.
- Runs locally on your own GPU – avoids cloud costs.
- Actively developed and community supported.
By running Tortoise TTS locally, you can use AI speech synthesis without any ongoing costs. However, you do need a fairly powerful GPU to use this.
Tortoise offers a wide range of standard voices in many languages. While you can’t create custom voice clones like you can with ElevenLabs, the naturalness of Tortoise’s default voices is quite impressive.
You also miss out on the true real-time synthesis offered by ElevenLabs. Local generation on Tortoise TTS causes a bit of latency during speech output.
Overall, Tortoise TTS is an attractive free option for batch text-to-speech where custom voices are not needed. But latency and clone adaptation are limitations.
RHVoice – Voice synthesizer for Linux and Android
RHVoice is an open-source speech synthesizer developed by Olga Yakovleva that supports multiple languages. Most important features:
- Good quality voices using concatenative synthesis.
- Works offline once votes are downloaded.
- Versions for Linux, Android devices and tablets.
RHVoice takes a more old-fashioned approach to speech synthesis, using pre-recorded voice samples instead of AI-generated voices. The results sound very natural and accurately reproduce intonation, rhythm and tension.
Because RHVoice uses pre-recorded clips, Latvian and Russian voices sound the most realistic given the developer’s specialization. Other languages use a mix of recorded and synthesized voices.
As an offline synthesizer, RHVoice avoids ongoing costs. But the precompiled sound banks take up significant storage space – usually tens of MBs per voice.
For Linux or mobile users who need offline TTS without the upfront cost, RHVoice is quite capable. But recording custom voice clones is not supported due to the underlying concatenative technology.
eSpeak – Compact open-source speech synthesizer
Going up over the years, but still widely used, eSpeak is a compact open-source software speech synthesizer that supports many languages. Key aspects:
- Actively developed for more than 20 years.
- Very small library size, low resource usage.
- Available versions for Linux, Windows and more.
As an early example of compact formant synthesis, eSpeak’s voices don’t sound as natural as modern AI synthesizers. The pronunciation is not always accurate and the intonation is somewhat robotic.
However, eSpeak’s small size and efficiency make it useful even on low-power devices such as the Raspberry Pi. For background tasks that involve converting a lot of text to speech on a limited budget, it remains capable.
Given its age and synthetic approach, custom voice cloning is not feasible with eSpeak. It is a purely functional text-to-speech engine best suited for systemic use rather than customer-facing applications that require high voice quality.
Mycroft Mimic – Lightweight text-to-speech
A relative newcomer to the field of open-source speech synthesis, MyCroft imitation is a lightweight text-to-speech engine optimized for low resource usage. Most important features:
- Efficient neural text-to-speech engine.
- Engine compatible with Python and C++ applications.
- Active community development.
MyCroft Mimic is designed for embedding text-to-speech capabilities into applications and devices when cloud services are not ideal. The neural voices sound very natural given the efficiency achieved.
Memory usage is only 50 MB – an order of magnitude smaller than many competitors. This allows Mimic to run even on single board computers such as Raspberry Pi. Low-latency API access further optimizes real-time usage scenarios.
Being an open source project focused on embeddable uses, MyCroft Mimic does not support custom voice cloning. But standard neural voices provide natural-sounding speech, even on limited devices.
Play.ht – Voice Cloning for Web Apps
Switching local speech engines, Play.ht is an AI-powered voice cloning and text-to-speech service optimized for web integration.
It offers a free tier, including:
- Custom voice clones from short audio clips.
- Fast API for real-time speech synthesis.
- Simple JavaScript integration.
By focusing on lightweight web implementation, Play.ht makes it easy for even basic websites to leverage custom voice cloning. Recording just 30-60 seconds of audio is enough to create a clone.
The free tier allows up to 1 million characters per month. Beyond that volume, choosing a paid plan is required.
For basic voice cloning needs on sites with less traffic, Play.ht is quite capable. Although advanced makers may find that professional options like ElevenLabs provide better emulation of pitch, tone, and other vocal quirks.
Also read: Can you get ElevenLabs for free?
Amazon Polly – Robust text-to-speech cloud
Although Amazon is best known for its e-commerce platform, it also offers voice synthesis Amazon Polly. Main capabilities:
- High quality text-to-speech in the cloud.
- Broad language support including NLP preprocessing.
- Easily integrates with other AWS services.
Polly produces very natural and fluent speech using advanced machine learning models. As an AWS service, it scales seamlessly to any voice volume.
The big disadvantage is the costs. The free usage tier only allows up to 5 MB of voice per month. Additionally, you pay per characters synthesized, starting at $4 per 1 million characters.
For small to medium text-to-speech workloads, Polly offers the best output quality in its class given Amazon’s resources. But costs quickly increase when scaling up compared to alternatives.
CloudTTS – Cloud-based voice service
Billed as the “ElevenLabs Alternative,” CloudTTS is a cloud-based speech synthesis platform with competitive quality and prices. Key aspects:
- High quality voices using the latest AI models.
- Custom voice clones available.
- Pay per API call pricing model.
Pricing per 1 million API calls starts at €15 and drops from there for higher volumes. They also offer flat-rate plans with higher fees.
CloudTTS is not open source, but their published demos show impressive voice mimicry and naturalness. They offer voice cloning as an add-on, although it probably doesn’t match the sophistication of ElevenLabs.
For mid-tier cloud speech synthesis workloads, CloudTTS balances cost and quality. Businesses with high voice needs can achieve significant savings over their competitors while maintaining modern voice quality.
FakeYou – AI voice cloning platform
By focusing solely on voice cloning, FakeYou is an AI-powered voice imitation platform. Most important features:
- Upload audio to create custom voice clones.
- Clones mimic tone, pitch, woodwind and pronunciation.
- 24 different language options.
FakeYou offers a free trial to test its voice cloning capabilities before you need to subscribe. Reviewers praise how well their imitators manage to mirror the vocal nuances of just short voice samples.
However, FakeYou focuses on pre-recording voice clones for distribution rather than real-time synthesis. Most clones require manual review before they are available.
FakeYou delivers very accurate voice imitation. But the manual production and lack of API access limit real-time use cases compared to ElevenLabs.
Conclusion
ElevenLabs is at the top of the market, offering unparalleled quality for voice cloning and configurable text-to-speech. However, for some use cases, free and open source alternatives such as Tortoise TTS, RHVoice and MyCroft Mimic can provide high-quality speech synthesis without any ongoing costs.
Cloud services such as Play.ht, Amazon Polly and CloudTTS are also proving to be robust competitors in the sound quality space, with the advantage of being able to scale seamlessly as voice needs increase. Disadvantages include recurring costs, albeit at competitive market rates.
There is no perfect drop-in replacement that covers all the capabilities of ElevenLabs. Combining self-hosted open-source speech engines with cloud APIs can be a solution that balances cost, customizability, and scale. As with any complex tool, the ideal mix comes down to individual needs.
But the open-source speech ecosystem has made clear progress in recent years. For many applications, free or freemium options can now be a good replacement for full-featured commercial platforms.
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