If you’ve heard an advert for a brand like McDonald’s, listened to an audio summary of a news article, or even an entire business podcast on your commute recently, there’s a much greater chance that it was entirely generated by AI than a year ago, or even a few months ago.

It may be surprising how widespread AI voices are in the audio we hear around us (or the audio we create)... but less so if you already know how advanced voice synthesis has developed.

If you work within a large brand, publisher or agency that develops high volumes of dynamic audio creative, you may already be looking at partnering with a provider to generate voices from text-to-speech (TTS).

If that’s the case, you have a lot of choice.

At AudioStack, we work with over a dozen of the main providers, and know the strengths of each well.

So, we’re qualified to give you a snapshot of many of the different providers... and then tell you what advantages there are to an AI audio solution - not just text-to-speech - that brings all of them together.

What are the main AI audio providers on AudioStack?

At the time of writing there are currently 14 different providers, ranging from boutique voice synthesis specialists to industry leaders in AI, whose voices are available in AudioStack. 

In no particular order, these are:

1. Elevenlabs

ElevenLabs has a long track record of bringing compelling, rich and lifelike TTS and STS voices to creators and publishers seeking the ultimate tools for storytelling.

• Hear Renata read this sample Women’s Sports Roundup Ad for CapitalOne/iHeart:

2. Cartesia

Cartesia is a younger  - but no less established - provider of AI voice technology. It offers hyper-realistic and diverse voice options, as well as demonstrating impressive speed in text-to-speech generation capabilities.

3. Play.HT

Play.HT offers natural, humanlike and expressive voice performances across many languages and accents, suitable in many use cases - from podcasting to voiceovers and more.

4. OpenAI

OpenAI is an all-around leading provider in AI tools (including ChatGPT), and offers a number of highly-curated TTS voices with competitive naturalness and remarkable overall performance.

Listen to Alloy read this adapted excerpt from our live Audio is Instinctive presentation:

[Interested in thinking differently about audio?]

5. Microsoft Azure

Azure brings Microsoft’s power to bear with a huge selection of voices in a multitude of languages. A number of them are very well-suited to different speaking styles (moods) such as cheerful or narrative.

6. Resemble.ai

Resemble is a Canadian boutique voice provider that builds voices for English. Resemble also offers STS (Speech to Speech) and externally, offers exceptional deepfake security.

7. WellSaid Labs

WellSaid offers an excellent selection of English voices with a strong portfolio of diverse, international accents across several speaking styles.

8. Respeecher

Respeecher is an Ukrainian TTS company that, similarly to Wellsaid, offers an excellent selection of English voices with diverse accents and STS capabilities.

9. Narakeet

Narakeet is a text to speech provider that typically specialises in AI video voiceovers, but has advanced voice synthesis technology that supports 100 languages and 700 voices.

10. Speechify

Speechify is a TTS provider, particularly strong as a lifelike screen reader, that offers bespoke English accented voices that vary in cadence and emotion.

11. Amazon Polly

Polly is Amazon's TTS brand. As you would expect, it comes with a large number of voices in many languages; the fruit of an exceptional investment in innovative AI technology across the board.

12. Cereproc

CereProc is a boutique voice provider based in Scotland that specialises in advanced speech synthesis research. It offers a wide range of voices across several languages.

13. Google Wavenet

Wavenet, part of Google DeepMind, offers a huge range of text-to-speech voices across multiple languages. With many available, AudioStack has curated a selection of the best-sounding Wavenet voices across an incredibly diverse range of languages.

14. IBM Watson

IBM Watson Text-to-Speech is an API cloud service that enables you to convert written text into natural-sounding audio in a variety of languages and voices.

• Want to create an example ad for your brand or client's brand from any of the providers above? We can create an ad just for you, in seconds, in a live demo of our platform.

In all, at the time of writing, these combined providers give AudioStack users a choice of over 1,700 voices to use to turn text into lifelike human speech... without mentioning the unlimited number of voices you can synthesize yourself with safe voice cloning.

You may be considering, developing (or even have) a partnership with one of the AI voice providers listed above; or another.

But with a tool like AudioStack, you don’t have to choose.

What’s the commercial benefit of having multiple AI voice providers?

AudioStack provides a single entry point to a large catalogue of voice providers. We don’t have to tell you why having access to thousands of diverse, humanlike text-to-speech voices is incredibly exciting for you (or your client’s) brand.

However, there are some key commercial incentives for choosing a service that pulls together multiple providers. This way of working:

• Gives brands and agencies access to more high-quality voices from different providers

• Protects your business by providing a range of voice synthesis technologies with multiple AI voice options for each language, accent and mood.

• Futureproofs your business by ensuring you have access to the most innovative voice synthesis technology - in any language, for any use case.

What difference does the platform make?

However, it’s not just the voice library that’s important: it’s the framework in which it’s housed - that’s AudioStack.

And beyond simply having more, better voices, there’s a few more things to be aware of that AudioStack does to ensure you get the most quality and value out of the voices in your voice library.

• All voices gathered are high-quality because standardization is applied across all of them, ensuring a unified audio production approach - for example, our ‘Voice Intelligence Layer’ ensures pronunciation of certain words (that you can define) is consistent across all creative.

• AudioStack manages relationships with the providers, so you don’t have to. On a day to day basis, this ensures the API is maintained and the voices you have are always the most up-to-date versions.

• AudioStack curates the voices for users, ensuring that when you create audio assets, the voices suggested for you by filtering are the best for your needs 

In short, AudioStack makes the experience of generating AI audio seamless and less prone to mistakes.

With its audio production workflows, you aren’t just restricted to using an AI voice for your use case; you can unlock a powerful pipeline to generate audio creative at scale (and even deliver it as a frontend solution using our API).

AI Audio is much more than voice

We just said it’s seamless to generate AI audio with AudioStack. But what’s the difference between AI Voice and AI Audio?

The difference is as simple as this:

• This is Voice:

• This is Audio:

AI voice is just one part of the entire audio experience. Music, mixing, production - all of these choices have an impact on the creative you make, what it makes listeners feel, and what it compels them to do.

You know the effort to create, edit, produce and address this creative with a typical audio production process is time-consuming. Just for voices alone, you need to secure voice actors, deliver ad reads or narration, do so at scales that can incur prohibitive costs… and ensure that every subsequent stage after script-reading doesn’t get flagged for a re-read.

AI voice can take the hassle, slowness and expense out of the typical audio production process - but you still need to write scripts, mix and master ads, and address them at scale. For most businesses, it isn’t realistic, especially for the production of optimized, personalized and dynamic creative.

With an end-to-end AI audio production AudioStack enables brands and agencies to achieve complex audio production needs such as dynamic creative, personalization and localization incredibly simply, and incredibly quickly.

Need to show what the difference between AI voice and AI Audio is? Why not save and download this image for reference?

Ready to transform your audio production process with AI? Why not see how AudioStack can transform the way you produce broadcast-quality audio?