C-LARA

In his last post Manny talked about the addition of Whisper TTS as an option to using Google. Admittedly prosody is better, but the only options are American accents and most people will at least want to be able to select a British accent for English – indeed, in our experience of being in Europe, nobody wanted to learn English with a US accent. And obviously for French, one would like an authentic French accent, etc.

I’ve been looking at some of the options available, these are all paid options, but you do get what you pay for.

• Murf.AI is very popular and listening to the UK accents, I can see why. If you scroll down here, you can listen to the twenty languages supported. Note that the bigger languages like English and French have a lot of different voices, which could make for interesting content such as plays to be presented. Pricing is here.
• ElevenLabs is state of the art, superior to Murf in terms of quality of voice, number of languages and what the content creator can do. You can try it out here. Pricing is also per month.

Others I looked at included Narakeet and NaturalReader, but ElevenLabs is definitely best with Murf.AI also very acceptable.

It looks like each of these products will cost around $100US/month to permit adequate usage. Manny has already looked at the APIs which present no issues. ElevenLabs’ API is readily available, Murf.AI requires their permission, currently being sought. As usual, our question is ‘where’s the money coming from?’ – but at least we aren’t talking about huge sums and although neither site indicates a better rate for educational platforms, it could be worth asking anyway.

From my brief look at ReadSpeaker, it is notably inferior to both Murf-AI and ElevenLabs. It also gives no clue as to their pricing online, you have to approach them in order to know what the possibilities are.

For discussion, anyway!