Unreal Speech

Unreal Speech is a developer-focused text-to-speech API built to make natural-sounding voice generation dramatically cheaper and faster than incumbents like ElevenLabs, Amazon Polly, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud TTS. It targets teams that need to convert large volumes of text into audio without the high per-character costs typical of premium TTS providers, positioning itself as up to 11 times cheaper than ElevenLabs while still delivering natural-sounding output.

The API is built around three endpoints suited to different workloads: a low-latency stream endpoint for short interactive text (up to 1,000 characters, ~300ms response), a synchronous speech endpoint for medium content (up to 3,000 characters), and an asynchronous synthesisTasks endpoint capable of generating up to 10 hours of audio from as many as 500,000 characters in a single request. A WebSocket-based streamWithTimestamps endpoint streams audio alongside real-time per-word timestamp data, which is useful for building karaoke-style text highlighting or precise audio-text syncing.

Unreal Speech offers 48 voices spanning 8 languages, including US and UK English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Japanese, Hindi, and Mandarin Chinese, with adjustable speed, pitch, and bitrate. It is built on infrastructure derived from the open-source Kokoro TTS model, tuned by the Unreal Speech team for production reliability and scale, claiming 99.9% uptime and the ability to process over 10,000 pages of text per hour.

The tool is best suited for developers, startups, and businesses building podcast platforms, audiobook and article narration apps, accessibility tools, e-learning products, IVR systems, and AI voice agents that need to control text-to-speech costs at scale. Companies like Readwise.io and Matter (YC S20) are cited as customers who adopted Unreal Speech to cut TTS spend while maintaining listening quality.

Founder offers five pricing plans. The Free plan includes 250K characters (about 6 hours of audio) at $0/month. The Basic plan costs $4.99/month (discounted from $49/month for the first 6 months) and includes 3M characters (67 hours of audio). The Plus plan is $499/month with 42M characters (933 hours). The Pro plan costs $1,499/month and includes 150M characters (3,000 hours). The Enterprise plan is $4,999/month with 625M characters (14,000 hours). Custom pricing is available for businesses requiring 1B+ characters and volume discounts.