Hello, today I'm going to share with you solutions to create audiobooks or convert your blog articles into text. There are dozens of paid text-to-speech services with A.I. I tested several of them (as a paying user) and had several questions under analysis:
Price, ease of payment (monthly or annual billing), quality of voices, number of languages, way credits are spent, audio quality.
There are services with low monthly fees (starting at $8) but poor voice and
audio quality; for example, when you download the audio, it is an m4a file with
97 kbps.
Some services are expensive ($30 a month, or $160 a year with a discount).
Personally, to produce audiobooks, I like to pay a fair price monthly and that the payment method be VISA or PayPal (I don't like Stripe), and I want quality audio (mp3 with 320 kbps).
In most of these text-to-speech services, they charge credits whenever we
listen to the audio preview (they don't charge for each download), and they
charge for each audio conversion, as these resources waste a lot of GPU data
processing.
Speechelo is very well known; it's
a 27-dollar software, and they publish a lot on the internet. But the voices
don't seem natural to me; they seem robotic.
I tested Narakeet, and I didn't like it. The
audio was m4a at 97 kbps, poor quality.
I tried Fliki.ai, voices are good, but I was trying a free account and spent
all my credits and "minutes" on a small preview of audio. This site
spends all the credits very fast.
Avoid these sites.
The ones that are good:
Naturalreaders.com (the voices sound good), and
if you choose the monthly plan option, it costs €9.99 a month.
The audio file is an mp3 with good quality, and in the monthly plan, you can
have up to 1 million characters to use.
Payment is by Visa card.
Voiceovermaker.io (it's good).
MP3 audio files of high quality. This site has no recurring subscription; it
leaves the user "free". You pay per task.
You can try it for free (but with limitations and 800 characters) or plan to
pay €9 (to convert 60,000 characters), or €15 (for 120,000 characters), which
is enough for an audiobook.
It can also make videos and save audio as WAV files.This is essential when you
want to create audiobooks to be accepted on sites like "Findaway,",
"Kobo,", "Draft2Digital," and other platforms.
This site has over 600 voices (male and female) and 30 languages. Supports
SSML. This company is from Germany.
Voicemaker.in
I chose, out of all of them, to be a customer of this site. Voicemaker has an easy-to-use platform and good support (they respond quickly to my emails).
The price is fair (from €5 per month) or a €50 annuity (depending on the plan), but I opted to pay €25 per year to create an audiobook, which gives me around 1 million characters.
The audio can be downloaded in mp3 (192 kbps) or WAV, with good quality, 48000Hz. The voices are some of the most natural I've ever heard.
To create an audiobook, I used a €25 payment (annual), which gave me 1 million characters (about 800 premium A.I voices, and much more.
Another important aspect is the text box where you write or paste the text;
this box has a lot of space, and you can write big text without
"cuts" or sections.
Supports SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language), allowing for more
customization in your audio response by providing details on pauses and audio
formatting for acronyms, dates, times, and abbreviations.
Company headquarters
are in Wyoming (US) and India.
Human narrators can charge up to $250 an hour. They spend at least two hours recording one audiobook. That's 500$.!
So, the easy option is using an A.I text-to-speech software.
Where can you sell your audiobook and make a profit?
Be careful with some sites; Audible (from Amazon) and Findaway have strict audio requirements, and they profit from narrators; they only accept audiobooks that were produced by the narrators in their database; that's a business.
I sell my audiobooks on Kobo and Payhip (as well as directly to customers). Personally, I don't trust Google Play Books or Lulu; they never paid my royalties.