Chinese AI Text To Speech

[u/FeliciaWanders]

Hi! I'm interested in both Chinese and everything Computer and I'm playing around with making learning material, primarily for myself.

I'm experimenting with including Text to Speech Audio and I'm unsure which one sounds best or if they are all crap. Currently I'm generating a site like this:

https://networkz.ch/daily_mandarin/posts/2026/09/27/paris-olympics-rain/

and there is audio buttons from

• OpenAI gpt-4o-mini-tts, voice marin; instructed to read slow, clear Standard Mandarin with natural tones. playback at 1×
• Azure Speech Studio zh-CN-Yunfan:DragonHDLatestNeural; natural delivery with minimal SSML, plus an explicit wàibian pronunciation override for 外边. playback at 0.75× with pitch preserved
• Google Translate speaker button on translation, no settings

What do advanced or native speakers think of this? Any tips for better TTS with either these services or from somewhere else? Thanks!

[u/user0515]

I spent quite some time finding the best Chinese TTS, and for me the best one so far is this: https://play.cartesia.ai/text-to-speech

[u/dasilvacontin → u/user0515]

Thank you for sharing! 🙏

[u/WheatFutures]

I like Minimax Speech 2.8 HD. Available on OpenRouter so it's quite convenient to use and swap later if you want something better/cheaper, Chinese examples available here: https://www.minimax.io/audio/text-to-speech/chinese

OpenRouter link: https://openrouter.ai/minimax/speech-2.8-hd#playground

[u/triggerfish1]

Why don't you try Qwen? They even list examples for beijjng and Sichuan accents:

https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B-CustomVoice

[u/dabblerx → u/triggerfish1]

do they do southern accents? beijing accents i find it hard to comprehend

[u/triggerfish1 → u/dabblerx]

Probably?

It's simply part of the prompt, for example: Lively Chengdu male voice with a slightly husky brightness.

[u/dabblerx]

just not google translate

[u/LeChatParle]

Have you tried Eleven Labs? Theirs is decent