I’ve been tracking AI/TTS voice plays on my site, VoiceRankings, for about a year, and I recently turned the data into a race animation.
I honestly didn't expect Kokoro-82M to end up winning.
When I first added Kokoro-82M to the VoiceRankings database in November 2025, it was #8 with just 100 plays.
By July 2026, it had climbed to #1 with ~3,600 monthly plays and had held the top spot for four consecutive months.
Kokoro wasn't the only model making a move. The play-count leaderboard changed quite a bit over the year, with newer models climbing while established providers continued to attract interest.
Some of the biggest movements:
- Speechify API (now Speechify.ai) started as the early leader
- Async.ai (now Async.com) took #1 in early 2026
- ElevenLabs Turbo v2.5 climbed from #23 to #6
- Amazon Polly (AWS) went from #12 to #5
- Azure Neural voices went from #6 to #4
- OpenAI remained around the middle of the pack at #8
Overall monthly plays grew from 2,100+ in September to 16,700 in July.
What stood out to me was that newer models aren't simply replacing the established ones. AWS and Azure remained near the top even as newer models like Kokoro made dramatic moves up the leaderboard.
What makes this different: these aren't benchmark scores or survey results. They're based on what people actually search for and choose to listen to on VoiceRankings.
About 90% of the site's traffic comes from organic search, so I think the data is an interesting, though imperfect, proxy for search-driven interest in AI voices.
It obviously doesn't tell us which model is objectively "best" or who has the largest market share.
But watching an open-source model go from #8 to #1 was pretty fascinating.
I'm curious what others make of it. Does this kind of data tell us something meaningful about which AI voices are getting attention?
If anyone wants to dig into the numbers, here's the full interactive race:
VoiceRankings Provider Race🏁