Speechify started as a mobile app that can help you to retain more by converting books, and documents into audio.
Gradually Speechify introduced Speechify Studio for creating AI voiceover, a specific app for audiobooks, text-to-speech API, and many more features. Speechify has different pricing for each product.
In this blog post, I will share every Speechify product alternative – mobile app alternative for speed listening, Voiceover Studio alternative for creating voiceover & voice clones, and API alternatives as well.
Since Speechify offers many products, you will find alternatives for each different use case.
- Crikk: Natural-sounding voices but limited import options
- Azure AI Speech: Reliable API at affordable pricing
- Listening: Cross-platform availability but no free account
- Natural Reader: Affordable but lacks lifetime deals and less frequent updates
- Murf AI: Custom voice options but expensive plans
- AWS Polly: Reliable API but robotic-sounding voices
- Resemble AI: Unique voice cloning but fewer voices
- Descript: Superior voice cloning but slower generation
Crikk – Speechify Reader Alternative
Price: Free with in-app purchase
Crikk is a newly launched text-to-speech reader that lets you read and listen at the same time. Crikk is available as a mobile app and web version.
You can sign up for Crikk free without any card details. Currently, it provides 5000 characters to free users.
It offers more natural-sounding AI voices than Speechify. You can also download audio files to listen without an internet connection.
Crikk Pros
More Natural Sounding Voices: The Crikk app’s voice sounds more natural. You are also getting more languages and voice support than Speechify. Here are the voice samples of crikk.
Crikk also supports 100+ languages and offers popular languages with multiple accents, for example, English is available in USA, UK, Australia, Canada, India, etc accents.
Some crikk voices are multilingual which means they can automatically detect and read in 50+ languages.
Currently, there are more than 20+ Multilingual voices. The total number of voiceovers is 300+.
Better OCR Reader: OCR technology is used for converting images into text. Crikk OCR technology is better Spechify. It would require fewer corrections while converting images into text. Crikk can even read handwritten notes correctly.
Export Audio file: Another advantage of having Crikk is you can download the output as mp3 and listen offline. Speechify does not allow you to download files, you need an internet connection.
But this isn’t the case with Crikk, it doesn’t matter whether you are an Android or iPhone user.
Better Free Plan & Affordable: Last but not least, we have price. If you are not willing to pay don’t worry. Unlike Speechify free plan robotic voice, Crikk has natural-sounding voices.
Limitations
Not everything is better than our mobile app. But we believe in transparency that’s why we are publishing features that crikk while publishing this article.
However, Crikk is a new platform and catching things super fast. You will soon see these features in the Crikk mobile app.
Limited Import options: Crikk does not allow you to paste links and read them for you. Currently, it supports pasting text, importing documents pdf and txt, gallery photos, and taking pictures with a phone.
No Speed-up: Speechify automatically increases speed after 1000 words. Crikk doesn’t have this feature at this moment. However, you can increase speed manually whenever you want.
No Chrome extension: Crikk doesn’t have any Chrome extension. Currently, it is an available mobile app for both Android and iPhone and web versions.
Pricing
Here are the crikk current pricing plans
| Free | Monthly – $14/month | Lifetime – $127 |
|---|---|---|
| 5000 Characters | 2 million characters/month | 1 million character/month |
| up to 5k Characters per file | 12k Characters per file | 12k Characters per file |
| Import documents & images | Import documents & images | Import documents & images |
| 100+ languages | 100+ languages | 100+ languages |
| 100+ voices | 300+ Voices | 300+ Voices |
Azure AI Speech – Speechify Studio & API Alternative
Price: Free with an as-you-go plan
Azure AI Speech is the best alternative to Speechify Studio and API. Azure offers various cloud-based services from virtual machines to tts API. Text-to-speech API is one of Azure’s products.
Azure tts (text-to-speech) API is the most used text-to-speech API in the world. In fact, you would find Azure AI Speech voices inside the Speechify Studio. Azure also offers a Studio for creating voiceovers. Azure recently launched a personal voice API as well which lets anyone speak 50+ languages.
Azure AI Speech does not have a mobile app similar to Speechify. It is the best alternative to Speechify Studio and API.
Here are Azure’s advantages over Speechify
Voiceover Quality: Azure voices sound more than speechify. Speechify Studio us various APIs along with Azure. Speechify also builds its own unique voices. Azure voices sound more realistic if you compare them with Speechify-specific voices.
Affordability: Azure offers $200 bonus upon registration. It requires a credit card. Text-to-Speech API and voiceover Studio will cost based upon usage.
Frequent Updates: Azure keeps adding new voices and features for example recently they have introduced voice clone API in 50 languages. Azure also provides multilingual voices that can speak 91 languages like a native speaker.
Reliable API: Azure API is known for its reliability and enterprise-level readiness. Many large companies already trust and use Azure API for their operations. This shows that it is dependable and capable of handling complex business needs. Azure’s robust infrastructure and consistent performance make it an ideal choice for organizations looking for stability and scalability.
Azure also offers API for real-time at lower latency than Speechify. Overall, Azure offers more realistic voices and more language support at a more affordable price.
Pricing
Azure pricing is based on the pay-as-you-go model. The final cost is calculated based on per character. Here is how Azure calculates pricing.
| Azure AI Speech |
|---|
| $15 – 1 million characters |
| $12 per 1M characters (minimum 80 Million chars required) |
| $9.75 per 1M characters (minimum 400 Million chars required) |
| $7.50 per 1M characters (minimum 2,000M Million chars required) |
Listening – Speechify Reader Alternative
Price: Free trial with In-app purchase
Listening is another Speechify reader alternative. It is available as a web app and mobile app. Its mobile app is available for both iPhone and Android users.
Listening offers a 3-day trial of premium features similar to Speechify. However, it does not provide free account creation like crikk and Speechify. Currently listening is only available in the English language.
Listening can also take notes, highlight crucial text, and offer text reading.
Listening Pros
Remove excess text: Listening can automatically skip text like header, footer, references citations, and computer code. Thus you can focus on learning important concepts.
Natural Sounding Voices: Listening voices sound better than speechify but not better than Crikk. Overall, voices are great and can be listened to for hours. Keep in mind that, currently it supports only the English language, and voice options are also limited.
Across Platforms: Listening is available across all platforms android, iPhone, chrome extension, and web app. It syncs your data across all devices. Thus you can listen on any device.
Listening Cons
No Free Account: Lisening does not provide a free account. As soon you sign up, you must start 3 day trial, or otherwise you will not be able to use the platform.
English language Only: Currently Listening com works only in the English language. It also offers only 8 voices.
Unusual loading Sometimes: While processing pdf (skipping citations etc) sometimes the app takes longer than expected.
No Export Option: Listening does not allow you to save audio files offline. You need a Listening subscription to listen to your documents.
Pricing
Listening is more affordable than Speechify. It does not offer different pricing to each region, unlike Speechify. Here are the current pricing plans.
| Monthly $15/month | Annual $119/year |
|---|---|
| Unlimited Listening | Unlimited Listening |
| Listen to emails, MOBI, EPUB | Listen to emails, MOBI, EPUB |
| Speeds up to 4x | Speeds up to 4x |
Natural Reader
Price: Free trial with In-app purchase
Natural Reader is one of the oldest text-to-speech website. It offers two products similar to Speechify.
Natural reader is personal for speed listening. Personal is available as a mobile app (Android & iPhone) and Chrome extensions. It can convert images, and documents into speech similar to Speechify.
Natural reader commercials (AI voiceover generated) can be accessed through the website. It allows you to create an AI voiceover along with a download option. It offers all personal license voices and premium voices for creating human-like voiceovers.
Natural reader commercials also let you include various AI voices inside the script single. So you can create dialogue-type audio files in one shot. Natural readers have different pricing for both licensed personal and commercial plans.
Natural Reader Pros
Multiple languages: Natural reader supports multiple languages. It supports more than 100 languages including popular languages with multiple accents for example english (USA, Canada, India, UK, Australia, etc), Spanish (Spain, USA), French (France, Canada), and many more.
Natural Sounding AI Voices: The Natural reader has two plans with AI voice and without AI voices. AI voices would sound natural similar to the crikk. In fact, natural readers is using the same voices.
Affordable: Natural Reader annual license would cost you $110.
Natural Reader Cons
No Lifetime Deal: Natural Reader does not offer lifetime deal similar to Crikk. You have to keep renewing your subscription if you want to improve speed listening.
Expensive Monthly Plan: Natural readers provide 5 minutes of free usage to the free user. Their monthly plans will cost you $19 whereas the annual plan is $110/year. In case you want to try premium service first then it is expensive for you.
Less Updates: Natural Reader offers less frequent updates. This is the reason Natural Reader has fallen behind the other tools.
Pricing
Natural readers have two different plans for readers a.k.a personal and AI voiceover generators known as commercial.
Personal Plan
Plus plan offers more than natural-sounding AI voices
| Premium Yearly $9.99/month or $59.88/year | Plus Yearly $19/month or $110/year |
|---|---|
| Download to MP3 (1 chars/month) | Download to MP3 (1 chars/month) |
| Premium Voices | Premium Voices |
| AI plus Natural |
Commercial Pricing
| Features | Monthly Plan ($99/month) | Yearly Plan ($588/year) | Yearly Small Business Plan ($294/year) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Commercial license for audio distribution | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| 225 AI voices in 40+ languages | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| ChatGPT-powered AI Script Assistant | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| LLM Voice Cloning | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| LLM Multilingual Voices | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Emotional AI Voices | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Pronunciation Editor (AI Voices) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Advanced Tunes (AI Voices) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Murf AI – Studio Alternative
Price: Free with a Paid subscription
Murf AI is a tool that lets you create AI voiceover. It offers unique voices that no other platform is offering. Murf AI is a strong alternative to Speechify Studio for creating voiceovers.
Murf AI also offers voice clone and more customization while creating voiceover for example you can generate different styles of speech if you don’t like the results.
Murf can be accessed through their website they do not have any mobile app.
Murf AI Pros
Regenerate: Murf AI offers a voice regenerate feature. Basically it regenerates the audio file with a different style. Thus you can find the ideal style for specific requirements
Speech to Speech: Murf AI also offers speech to speech model or in simple words voice changer. You can record voice and AI voice will mimic it.
Video Creator: Murf AI offers a basic video maker feature along with stock media. You can create basic videos inside the murf studio. You can add your own media, stock media, cut video, adjust duration, and other basic things.
Free trial: It offers a free trial with all major features. It lets you generate 10 minutes of voiceover in the free plan.
Integration: It can be integrated into canva, PowerPoint plugin, and Google Slides for creating voiceovers inside these platforms
Muf AI Cons
No Downloads in the Free Trial: You can’t export results inside the free trial. It just lets you create a voiceover or video file. However, exporting is available only for paid users.
Expensive Plans: Murf AI plans are quite expensive, Its google slide integration and voice changer are part of the business plan which would cost you a minimum of $99/month
Outdated Voice Clone: Murf AI offers voice clones only for enterprise users. It would cost you a minimum few thousand dollars. It requires a minimum of 1-2 hours of data and it would take 1-4 weeks to create a voice clone.
Murf AI Pricing
Here are the current pricing of Murf AI
| Free | Creator $29/month or $228/year | Business $99/month or $792/year |
|---|---|---|
| 2 Projects | 5 Projects | 50 projects |
| 10 minutes of Voice Generation | 2 hours of generation | 8 hours of generation |
| Try everything in the Business plan for free | All Voices | All Voices |
| No Download | AI Voice Changer | |
| Google Slides Integration | ||
| Unlimited Downloads | Unlimited Downloads |
AWS Polly – API Alternative
Price: Free with pay-as-you-go
AWS Polly is text to speech API service from AWS. AWS is the most popular service for cloud-based hosting. It offers many different products, and AWS Polly is one of them.
AWS Polly offers 60+ voices in 40+ languages. It offers 4 different types of APIs, Generate, Long form, Standard, and Natural.
Generate sound the most realistic. Standard sound is the most robotic. Natural is in between while the long form lets you convert unlimited characters at one shot.
Overall AWS has fallen behind other tts programs such as Azure AI Speech. However, the AWS API is more reliable than the Speechify API.
AWS offers 5 million characters for free upon registration for the first year. Here are all the advantages of using AWS Polly API.
AWS Pros
Reliable API: AWS is one of the most reliable cloud services in the world. Many enterprise users such as Trintmedia already using AWS Polly API.
Affordable Pricing: AWS natural pricing is based upon usage, unlike Speechify which is a subscription. It would cost you $16 per million characters.
Free trial: AWS offers 5 million free characters upon registration for 1 year. AWS Polly Playground lets you test all voices so you can select the best for your needs.
AWS Cons
Robotic Voices: AWS voices even Generative tts sound quite robotic compared to other APIs such as Azure. It looks like AWS is fallen behind the race in tts API.
Outdated Voice Clone: AWS voice clone is expensive, requires special access, and tons of data, and still sounds robotic. Speechify and Azure let you clone voice with 1 minute of data.
Resemble AI – API & Studio Alternative
Price: Free trial with a Paid subscription
Resemble AI is known for its high-quality text-to-speech API. Resemble AI also offers voice clone, speech-to-speech, and audio editing. The audio editing feature lets you correct speech mistakes by typing words. It offers multilingual voices basically AI voices that can speak multiple languages. Currently, it supports 100 languages.
Resemble is a great alternative to Speechify Studio and its API. Its API is used by many big enterprises such as Netflix, Paramount, and many more.
Resemble playground or studio has fewer features than Speechify studio. However, it provides more customization while creating voiceover. You can adjust the temperature to adjust variability. Its legacy editor lets you create a conversation voiceover in one shot and adjust audio settings such as format Precision and sample rate.
It lets you create up to 20000 characters long voiceover at once. However, its billing system is based on the minutes of audio generated.
Here are all the pros of Resemble AI over Speechify.
Resemble AI Pros
More natural-sounding AI voices: Resemble AI voices sound more natural than speechify. Its voices are unique you would not find it on any other platform. Speechify is using AWS, and Azure API along with their own voices.
Better Voice Clone: Resemble also lets you clone with your voice with less than 5 minutes of data. Overall, Resemble AI provides a more natural-sounding voice clone than Speechify.
Speech-to-Speech Model: Resemble AI also lets you generate speech-to-speech. Basically, you record a sample in your voice and the AI also will speak exactly like you. Speechify does not provide this feature.
Audio Edit: Once you have cloned your voice, you can upload any audio. Resemble will transcribe it, then you can correct words. Thus you can correct speech mistakes by typing. Speechify does not provide this feature.
Resemble AI Cons
Fewer Voices: Resemble AI has fewer voices than Speechify. Currently, it has 89 voices while Speechify has over 200+ voices.
Confusing Pricing: Most of the text-to-speech products are based on characters or words. While Reemble AI is based on seconds. Thus it can be confusing in beginning to select the plan according to your needs.
Fewer Features in Studio: Resemble AI missing features like Video maker, AI avatars, and transcription generator. Overall Resemble AI is a great alternative for Speechify API.
Resemble AI Pricing
It lets you generate 150 seconds of free audio. Here are the paid plans.
| Creator $29 (First month $1) | Professional $99/month | Business $499/month |
|---|---|---|
| 10,000 Seconds | 80,000 Seconds | 320,000 Seconds |
| $0.006/sec after 10,000 seconds | $0.002/sec after 80,000 seconds | $0.002/sec after 320,000 seconds |
| 5 Instant Voice Clones | 25 Instant Voice Clones | 500 Instant Voice Clones |
| 1 Professional Voice Clone | 3 Professional Voice Clone | 10 Professional Voice Clone |
Descript – Studio Alternative
Price: Free with a Paid subscription
Descript is known for text-based video editing. It will transcribe your audio files. Deleting text would delete specific parts from the video. Descript offers overdub that lets you correct speech mistakes by typing similar to resemble AI audio edit.
It also offers voice clone, text-to-speech voices, and many more features.
Descript offers unique voices that you would not get on any other tool. Its AI voices also sound quite realistic. Descript recently integrated Openai text-to-speech voices as well.
Descript offers the highest voice quality. However, it supports only English language. Descript is known for its Overdub feature that lets you correct speech mistakes by typing.
Descript can be an alternative to Speechify Studio if you are looking for unique AI voices and the highest quality voice clone.
Descript Pros
More natural-sounding AI voices: Descript voices sound more natural than speechify. Its voices are unique you would not find it on any other platform. Speechify is using AWS, and Azure API along with their own voices.
Better Voice Clone: Descript offers one of the highest-quality voice clones. It also lets you clone your voice with less than 5 minutes of data. Overall, Resemble AI provides a more natural-sounding voice clone than Speechify.
Overdub: Descript is known for its audio editing feature which lets you correct speech mistakes by typing. Since it offers the highest quality voice clone, overdub also works perfectly.
Descript Cons
Fewer Voices: Descript AI has fewer voices than Speechify. Currently, it has less than 20 voices while Speechify has over 200+ voices.
English Language only: Descript voice clone work only in the English language. Most of the Stock AI voices also work only in the English language. While there are 6 languages that can speak 56 languages.
Slower Generation: Descript takes quite a long time to generate voiceovers. Speechify, Crikk, and all others generate voiceovers quite fast.
Descript Pricing
Descript-free plan lets you generate 5 minutes of speech. Here are their paid plans
| Hobby – $19/month | Creator – $35/month | Business – $50/month |
|---|---|---|
| 30 minutes/month | 2 hours/month | 5 hours/month |
| 1 Voice Clone | 1 Voice Clone | 1 Voice Clone |
| 10 hours transcription | 30 hours transcription | 40 hours transcription |
Speechify Limitations
Here are Speechify’s limitations that make its alternative the best choice.
Different Pricing: Speechify’s pricing varies by country. The features remain the same, but the cost differs. In countries like India, Speechify is more affordable, while it is more expensive in places like the United States. Below is a screenshot showing Speechify’s pricing in India & USA.
Confusing Products: Speechify has various different products, Speechify Reader for speed listening and Speechify Studio for voiceover. Speechify also launched API of their tts voices. Each product requires a different subscription. These different products are confusing users. Some users end up purchasing different products.
No Export Option: Speechify does not let you export audio files for listening offline. An active subscription must required to listen to audio files. However other alternatives like crikk let you export audio files and let you listen offline.
Robotic Voices: Speechify premium voices sound better than the free plan however still sound robotic compared to other apps. Crikk and Listening offers premium voices that you can listen to for hours.
Best Speechify Alternative?
The best speechify alternative depends upon your specific requirements. Crikk provides more natural-sounding voices, a free account, audio export, and much more.
Azure AI Speech is a great alternative to Speechify API, it is a more reliable API, more affordable, better voice clone, and much more.
Descript and resemble AI provides unique voices and high-quality voice clones. I hope this blog post helped you decide on the best Speechify alternative for your specific requirements.
