Unreal Speech
Low-cost text-to-speech API on Kokoro-82M with 300ms streaming, 10-hour requests, and per-word timestamps
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unrealspeech.comAbout Unreal Speech
Unreal Speech is a text-to-speech API that competes almost entirely on cost, claiming to be roughly eleven times cheaper than ElevenLabs and putting a side-by-side monthly comparison on its own homepage. It runs on Kokoro-82M, a small open-weights TTS model, which is what makes the price structure possible. The technical specifications are aimed at production rather than demos: audio starts streaming in about 300 milliseconds, a single request can produce up to ten hours of audio, and per-word timestamps come back with the synthesis so you can highlight words in sync with playback. Timestamps are available in three ways — a websocket endpoint that streams audio and timestamps together, or the /speech and /synthesisTasks endpoints with TimestampType set to word or sentence, which return a JSON URI of word/start/end/text_offset objects. The long-request ceiling matters for audiobook and long-form article narration, which is exactly where per-character billing on premium vendors becomes painful. There is a browser Studio for non-API use, a live demo with adjustable voice, language, speed, pitch, and bitrate, and a free tier of 250,000 characters — around six hours of audio, roughly half an audiobook — which is large enough to actually evaluate the quality on real content rather than on a sample paragraph. The team is based in San Francisco and publishes a technical blog on open TTS models.
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Studio-grade AI voices and speech-to-text — the voice layer most teams pair with tools like this.
Key Features
Unreal Speech Pros & Cons
✅ Pros
- +Dramatically cheaper per character than premium TTS vendors
- +10-hour single requests suit audiobooks and long-form narration
- +Word-level timestamps ship with synthesis instead of needing forced alignment
⚠️ Cons
- −Kokoro-82M voices are not as expressive as top-end proprietary models
- −No voice cloning advertised
- −The $4.99 Basic price is a six-month promo, not the standing rate
Who Is Unreal Speech Best For?
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