Description: Learn about the ways of working with a voice generator. Take a look at what it takes to be one of the alternatives to ElevenLabs and make an informed decision for your business.

Top 3 ElevenLabs Alternatives

With emerging businesses and companies dealing in technology research and development, and the need for engaging content for both marketing and learning purposes, AI has taken it a step further with text-to-speech generation. Instead of paying real voice actors, you can create AI voiceovers.

One such solution is ElevenLabs, and you're here because you're looking for alternatives to ElevenLabs. We're going to go over what text-to-speech AI is, what technologies most of these solution types use, how you get a human speech from AI, and the best three alternatives to ElevenLabs.

What Is Text-To-Speech AI?

As a process, text-to-speech (TTS) is basically speech synthesis, or a solution that generates speech that sounds human-like using AI. These AI solutions use advanced deep learning technology to get the context of the text and create quality output.

For this solution to work, it has to perform analysis on various factors. So, the process is a combination of linguistic analysis, audio synthesis, and NLP (Natural Language Processing). For you, it seems quite easy, you type some text in, and the AI analyzes it and generates the audio output corresponding to what you've written.

In essence, not all text-to-speech solutions are AI solutions, but the ones that provide output that doesn't sound like synthetic voices, i.e. robotic and monotonous voiceovers, probably are. An AI voice generator is a realistic generator that converts text to speech and sounds natural.

Voice Cloning Technology

Most AI text-to-speech solutions offer voice cloning. It's not an essential part of a TTS solution, but it is a nice feature to have. Apart from the capability to create hilarious voice impressions, this technology allows you to generate speech with the voice of someone else. It can be quite useful when you're unavailable for a meeting or you're giving an original walkthrough.

Although it can be fun recreating famous sounds, to have the voice cloned, recordings of your voice need to undergo analysis to make the voice generation natural. There can be different approaches to doing so, but it almost always involves using deep learning algorithms like neural networks to mimic a voice. There are plenty of benefits to voice cloning:

• Reduced cost: You can save money you would otherwise spend on hiring an actor or recording voiceovers for multiple purposes. Just type in the text and generate it using an AI voice platform.
• Personalization: With an AI voice generator, you can personalize a virtual assistant depending on the brand or service, or a group of individuals you're catering to.
• Voice preservation: With a proper AI voice generator, you don't have to worry about losing your voice. This can be good for celebrities or people who need to preserve their voice. So, they can use AI voiceovers.

Voice cloning AIs have a great set of useful advantages and uses, but they can also be used maliciously. So, be careful when you clone voices, and if you're cloning your own voice, and you see it being used somewhere, just make sure that whoever's using it has proper permissions.

Natural Sounding Speech vs Natural Sounding Voice

Even though these two sound like they refer to the same thing, there's a difference between realistic audio of a voice and realistic speech. Hopefully, this makes it a little clearer. So, what's the difference between these two? Let's see:

• Natural-sounding speech: This means that it can generate natural and expressive speech. A good AI voice will have a good intonation, rhythm, pacing, fluency, and pronunciation. Natural speech is the overall quality of all the mentioned factors.
• Natural-sounding voices: This refers to the quality of the voice. If the speech voices are not good, then there's no point in using any AI voices. A good one will have the right pitch, timbre, and tone.

Dialogue: Natural Sounding Voices

Imagine that you're making a video where you need two AI voices because you want to make a dialogue between two people. This can be just sound to depict a certain situation, or it can even involve some video editing to make it more realistic in video form.

A realistic text-to-speech solution will have this option. This is where natural-sounding voices have a role to play. It's not just another one of those talking head videos, it's more than that, it's a dialogue between two people completely generated from text. Here's what happens:

• Input processing: You provide a text, a dialogue between two people to a text-to-speech AI solution. It processes the input you provided and moves on to the next phase.
• Voice assignment: If you haven't configured any custom voices, the tool will assign two different voices because it's a dialogue.
• Voice generation: With this step, you'll hear two human-like voices. Finally, you'll get a natural-sounding audio once you get the speech output, and you'll be able to download it as various audio files.

What to Look For in An ElevenLabs Alternative?

The most important thing you cannot do without is human-sounding voices in these alternatives. Make sure that the model can provide natural and uninterrupted conversations, and that you have an option to choose a perfect voice for your needs.

Also, look for a model that uses advanced speech synthesis technology like deep learning models, neural text-to-speech, waveform generation, adaptation and personalization, and multiple voices and support for multiple languages. It should have real-time synthesis, but also:

• Customization: The service you're probably going to use should allow you to customize things like the pitch of the AI voice, the speed, and the emphasis.
• Appropriate pricing: It should not break the bank. Depending on what you're looking to achieve with AI voices, you should pay an appropriate price. Remember, you're not paying a talented voice actor, but you are getting a natural human voice for a much lower price.
• Options for integration: Check if the service offers some kind of integration in terms of APIs for specific software you might plan on using it with.
• A good reputation: Find a piece of AI voice technology that has a good reputation online. Remember, this will be your personal voice creator, and it might be good to know that it is a reputable one.

Rask AI

This service offers a number of tools you can use for education, marketing, content creation, game development, etc. These tools involve YouTube video transcription, translation, converting video to text, adding subtitles, converting audio to text, and more.

It is a generous solution with even more to come as they will soon release their text-to-video generation solution. It's only natural that this kind of service provides its own tool for generating speech from text. The advantages of using the Rask AI text-to-speech tool are:

• Multiple languages: There are over 130 languages supported by this solution. You can localize anything in almost any country with this kind of support. The money you once used to create different localizations of the same announcement can now be put to better use.
• Voice cloning: With their voice cloning tool you can clone your own voice, or you can use a celebrity voice to address your employees and make knowledge transfer videos much more fun. It's instant voice cloning.
• Multiple speakers: Unlike most solutions of this type, there is a possibility to create a dialogue with multiple speakers using voice separation technology. You don't have to settle for one narrator, and most AI voice generators might still not have this option.
• Voice to voice: It can transcribe your voice into text, but it can also take your voice and run it through the algorithm to make something you want to make in the first place. No worries, it's not a simple voice changer.

This is the most realistic voice generator out there because it can take any written text and turn it into human speech. The key difference between Rask AI and ElevenLabs is the fact that there's a 100-language difference in translation, Rask AI can translate over 130+ while ElevenLabs can translate only 29.

There's another significant difference that should tilt you towards deciding to go with Rask AI, it's the fact that ElevenLabs doesn't have the lip-sync multi-speaker feature. You can add the translated language to the video and align the lips of multiple speakers to move naturally in sync with the speech.

Natural Reader AI

The feature that separates Natural Reader from the rest is the fact that you can clone any voice you'd like instantly. So, it won't take much time to get a video or a recording of some message ready. Just transform the written text into an audio recording and that's it.

You can choose an AI voice that suits you best, but a downside to this solution is that it supports 28 languages. It is a high-quality solution because it also offers AI voice cloning, and you don't need to have great technical or language skills to generate text-to-speech outputs.

This service boasts the fact that they have AI voices that are unique. You also have other features such as:

• Multiple voice styles: This solution offers a large choice of styles when it comes to their AI voices. These synthetic voices range from friendly to hopeful emotions. When you hear the spoken words, you won't be disappointed.
• Voice cloning: You can create voice clones with this solution, not only close-to-exact copies of yourself, but you can also create a custom voice clone using your own audio recordings.
• LLM AI voices: These are the ones trained through large language models to make them unique. They are trained on human voice recordings so you don't have to use a voice changer to make it work.
• Actor library: With Natural Reader you can use professional voice samples for free, and you can use specific actors for that. Text-to-speech is as easy as it gets.

The main difference between Natural Reader and ElevenLabs is that Natural Reader is free to use if you're using it for yourself. You can get custom voices, but you'll have to pay for that, and even for the extraction of audio files.

PlayHT

It's a great solution that offers an AI voice actor library. PlayHT can provide you with great voiceovers and professional voice performances. It's mainly used for videos, to sync audio to videos and transcribe them with their editor.

Apart from their text-to-speech solution that offers over 800 expressive voices, over 130 languages, and custom voice models, you can use their speech software for things like voice cloning to get the best voice talent out there.

If you'd like to use their speech software for cloning your voice, you just need to provide your private voice data, and you'll get a great result in return. The library of 800 voices doesn't showcase only premium voices, that's what makes it so good because chances for copyright infringement drop significantly when the library of voices is diverse and unique. The main differences compared to ElevenLabs:

• Quality of voice: The pitch and the tone go in favor of ElevenLabs definitely, it just makes a narration sound more natural than it does. It's more lifelike and engaging compared to the one from PlayHT.
• Difference in features: One key feature that goes in favor of PlayHT is speed control, you can control the speed of the speech, but you also have per-word timestamps.
• The difference in pricing: It offers more than ElevenLabs does because you can write up to 12,500 characters for free, and with ElevenLabs it's only 10,000 characters. Their most expensive plans also show more benefits with PlayHT because it is three times cheaper.

Conclusion

There are many more alternatives to ElevenLabs, but we've listed the most important ones according to their specific features and how they compare. Text-to-speech is something that can help many industries. It can find its use in education and in business.

But, the most important use of such technology should be observed in localization. We should use these tools to localize learning, development, and business as much as possible. Rask AI seems to be a great fit for an alternative because it provides support for over 130 languages.