Head to head / AI Voice

Amazon Polly vs Unreal Speech

The verdict
  • Both cost about $16 per million characters.
  • Amazon Polly has a free tier to start; Unreal Speech does not.
ComparedAmazon PollyUnreal Speech
Cost / 1M chars$16$16
Starting price$49/mo
Free tierYes
Visit Amazon PollyVisit Unreal Speech

Feature by feature

FeatureAmazon PollyUnreal Speech
Languages30+8
Voice cloningNoNo
APIYesYes
Commercial useAll usageYes (free needs attribution)
Styles/emotionsLimitedLimited (pitch/speed)
OutputMP3, OGG, PCMMP3/PCM/WAV + timestamps

Amazon Polly

Developers and AWS teams needing cheap, scalable programmatic TTS at high volume.

  • +Very cheap per-character pricing
  • +Rock-solid AWS scale and uptime
  • +SSML, lexicons, speech marks
  • +Generous free tier first year

Unreal Speech

Developers who need cheap, scalable TTS for high-volume apps, narration, or captions.

  • +Among the cheapest per-character TTS
  • +Low-latency real-time streaming
  • +Per-word timestamps for subtitles
  • +Generous 250k-character free tier

Compared on the metrics we track for this category. Prices are the cheapest paid tier. Some links are affiliate links.