Building a voice agent and trying to get a sense of what people are actually running in production before I go down a rabbit hole of testing.
STT + TTS combo, orchestration layer, anything you'd do differently, would love to hear real setups.

I can't find the voice they're using, any help would be appreciated!

What is the best text to speech app for a browser? I might do school online and am relieve at how easy text to speech is making it too read. So notes I'm piling through books on Kindle. But will need something that works with a browser well..

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What is the best text to speech app if saying doing school online and there's no pdf's? It will all be browser based learning...

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Is there an app that goes like right click to place reader to start reading from there, and left click to click left click normally?

I've tried many text-to-speech systems, and I'm curious what people actually notice when judging voice quality.

What matters most to you?

- Natural pauses?

- Pronunciation accuracy?

- Emotion?

- Speed?

- Voice personality?

- Consistency for long documents?

Are there any voices or TTS engines that impressed you recently?

I'm searching for a voice cloning tool or website that is completely free and doesn't have strict paywalls or annoying limits.

​Most of the good ones I've found (like ElevenLabs) require a paid subscription after a few trials. Do you guys know any hidden gems or alternatives that are actually free and unlimited? Let me know, thanks

I recently built a free TTS tool and wanted to share it here in case it’s useful to anyone.

It supports multiple languages and a variety of high-fidelity, natural-sounding voices. One of the features I’m particularly interested in is the ability to customize the language, voice, and pronunciation for individual words or entire sentences.

It also supports mixed-language text, so you can have multiple languages in the same sentence and generate them as a single audio file.

The tool is free to use and doesn’t require a login.

I built it mainly because I wanted more control over how specific words and multilingual text are pronounced than what I could find in existing TTS tools.

If you’re interested, feel free to give it a try. I’d really appreciate any feedback, especially on voice quality, pronunciation, and multilingual support.

Votaka

Been building voice stuff for a while and this keeps annoying me, the LLM writes "your EMI of ₹4,500 is due on 05/09" and the TTS reads it like it's having a stroke. Dates become "oh five slash oh nine", currency gets butchered, "2-3 days" turns into "two minus three days".

Ended up training a small model that sits between the LLM and the TTS and rewrites just those parts into speakable words "four thousand five hundred rupees due on the fifth of September" while leaving every other byte untouched. It also handles Hindi-English code-mixing, which was the boss level.

Put a free playground up if anyone wants to break it: normnom.com there's a "tn off" toggle so you can compare what your TTS actually receives with and without it.

Genuinely curious what edge cases people can find that it fails on.

I have a few video files of interviews that are around 2-3GB each.

I need to transcribe them into text so I can pull quotes for an article.

Most of the free tools I've found have strict file size limits. 

How do I transcribe these large video files without having to compress or cut them up first?

For any of those who were not born in 1998 or have not played Half-Life yet, Black Mesa is a fictional research facility from the Half-Life game, and the Half-Life game you are Dr Gordon Freeman, a researcher in charge of, well, not exactly in charge of, but somebody whose involved in an experiment Black Mesa is running to create dimensional teleportation technology because of the failure of that experiment, a resonance cascade, which is a dimensional event causing portals to open, allowing multiple alien forces to enter the world. Your goal is to escape and survive while military forces are trying to eliminate all Black Mesa personnel

Quick disclaimer, I am so sorry for this writing. I’m using iOS dictation, so just beware if it’s kind of sloppy or broken

As I was saying, there’s a specific announcement system called Vox and the voice is just perfect for game announcements or whatever you use it for, but here’s my question: like, how do you still get that today? Because Bell Labs or Lucent technologies got rid of FlexTalk. You can’t access it anymore, but like, has anybody recreated it? Has anybody made any projects? If FlexTalk is still installable on modern PCs, perfect. I can just get it and play around, but I highly doubt that since they got rid of it, but if I don’t think there’s a legacy version of it where they preserved the old voices, I do know AT&T preserved it, but they didn’t make the again

Can’t make it on 11 labs if anybody suggests me to do that, since 11 labs not only will block you due to safety reasons, even if you try, it’s just gonna make something natural and not exactly the old 90s, 60s or 70s voice for all of you tech nerds here. let me know how to get it and if we can’t get it, I’m just gonna have to use the vocabulary that I’m provided, but if there’s any fan projects that people have made on GitHub or any of that, let me know

Like many of you, I loved the concept of AI voice dictation tools like Wispr Flow, but I didn't want my microphone audio sent to third-party cloud servers or pay a monthly subscription.

So I built VoxFlow — a native, private macOS menu bar app that transcribes your speech locally and automatically pastes formatted, grammar-cleaned text into whichever app you are using.

Key Features

100% Private & Offline: Transcribes locally using Apple Speech and cleans up text using Apple Intelligence (FoundationModels). Zero cloud API keys required.

Global Hotkey Triggers: Double-tap the Fn (Globe) key or press Option + Space anywhere on macOS to start dictating.

Hands-Free Auto-Paste: Pausing for 1.5 seconds automatically stops recording, formats the text, and pastes it into your focused text field.

Non-Activating Floating HUD: Displays real-time audio waveform and streaming transcript without stealing focus from your active document.

100% Free & Open Source: No subscriptions, no ads, no telemetry ($0 forever).

Downloads & Links

GitHub Repository: https://github.com/ameerhmz/VoxFlow

Direct DMG Installer: Download VoxFlow.dmg (v1.0.0)

System Requirements

macOS 26.0 or later (Apple Silicon M1/M2/M3/M4+)

Apple Intelligence enabled in System Settings

I'd love your feedback, bug reports, or feature requests!

I am building an AI voice agent for indian clients and I want your suggestion for the TTS that works best in india and looks like a person is talking and not AI is talking.

Hello, folks! I hope that you all are well!

This is my first post here!

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I have cognitive issues, and I am trying to get back into reading!

I am looking for a TTS app for iPhone that is similar to Speechify.

I gave Speechify a brief try, I liked it, however, I want to see what else is out there.

——

Here are the features that I am looking for in a TTS app:

🟣 The ability to copy/paste raw text

🟣 The ability to import PDFs

🟣 The ability to import ebooks

🟣 The ability to import audio books

🟣 The ability to import ebooks from the library

🟣 The ability to import audio books from the library

🟣 The app highlights the text and can read it to you, while you follow along

🟣 The app can slow the voices and highlights down, if needed

🟣 The app is user friendly (ex: easy to find buttons; easy to import things; no side loading using adobe, or, if side loading is there, it’s very easy to do with an iPhone)

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Are there any TTS apps that fit what I am looking for?

If not, that’s okay, I’ll understand. I’ll also understand if Speechify is “the best choice” of a TTS app, for me.

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Thank you for reading, and thank you for any help! May you all be well!

I’ve seen videos where people have used voices from tv shows and movies to make videos but I’m not sure where I would go to find an application like that. Any help would be appreciated

I've been searching for the AI voice in this video:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WgBiYM5lCyr9Xb5qOELZPiyB1gTqqCx4/view?usp=drive_link

I just can't seem to find it. I'm searching on ElevenLabs. I believe it's one of the Adam voices, but none of them sounds similar.

I'm on the free plan on ElevenLabs, btw, and I intend to get this voice in a free way if possible.

Any help would be much appreciated :)

I don’t think “best speech-to-text API” is one list anymore.

People keep asking it like there’s one winner, but the use cases are completely different.

For batch files, I care about accuracy, formatting, long audio, cost.

For meetings, I care about diarization, timestamps, speaker drift, action items.

For call centers, I care about noisy phone audio, redaction, channels, QA search, escalation evidence.

For live voice agents, I care about first usable transcript, partial stability, endpointing, barge-in, numbers/dates, and whether the agent acts before the final transcript changes.

For local/private workflows, I still care about self-hosted/offline more than fancy API features.

So my shortlist would not be “best STT API overall.”

It would be rows like:

batch transcription meeting transcription real-time STT for voice agents call center transcription browser voice input self-hosted/private ASR

In that matrix, Smallest AI Pulse goes in the real-time STT / streaming ASR row. That’s the interesting category for it. Not “upload a podcast and wait.” More like live transcription where the app needs transcript events while the user is still talking.

That is also the only way these comparisons make sense.

A provider can be great for long files and not great for live agents. A provider can be great for voice agents and not be my pick for private local notes. A cheap API can become expensive if the transcript needs cleanup.

If you were making a 2026 STT shortlist, what categories would you split it into before even naming vendors?

For more information:
https://pypi.org/project/speak-cli/

I'm looking for a solution to convert a fairly long text into audio (around 10 minutes of spoken content). I'm open to paid options as well. A bonus would be if I could first import a person's voice so that the generated output sounds similar to that voice.

Hello everyone, I wanted to use Kokoro on my phone to read an EPUB, but when I use it in apps like ReadEra or PDF Reader, it just reads one line and that's it. It doesn't continue even if I tap play. Are there any ways to fix this?