AI Voice & Speech Comparison

Amazon Polly vs. Hume AI

At a glance

Amazon Polly

Best for

Best for developers already on AWS who need speech synthesis inside an application, billed per character.

Freelancers
Small and mid-sized
Enterprise

Hume AI

Best for

Best for apps and content that need expressive, emotionally aware speech and real-time voice interactions.

Freelancers
Small and mid-sized
Enterprise

Cataleo does not name a winner. Both statements come from the vendors themselves.

Full Comparison

Criterion	Amazon Polly	Hume AI
Starting price	Free tier, then from $4 per 1 million characters Pay-as-you-go by characters sent for synthesis, including spaces and most SSML tags. Standard $4, Neural $16, Generative $30 and Long-Form $100 per 1 million characters. Speech Marks requests are charged at the same rates.	lower value Free tier; paid from $3 / month Paid tiers are metered by monthly TTS characters and EVI minutes.
Free trial	AWS Free Tier: 5 million Standard characters a month, plus 1 million Neural, 500,000 Long-Form and 100,000 Generative characters a month for the first 12 months	Free tier with 10,000 TTS characters and 5 minutes of EVI per month
Commercial use	Not stated	Yes
Output	Synthesised speech as MP3, Ogg Vorbis or raw PCM, plus Speech Marks metadata	Expressive text-to-speech (Octave) and empathic speech-to-speech (EVI)
API	Yes, the Amazon Polly API through the AWS SDKs and the AWS CLI	Yes
Hosting	Cloud (AWS)	Not stated
Voice cloning	Brand Voice only, and not as a self-service feature. It is a custom engagement in which the Amazon Polly team builds a Neural voice for the exclusive use of one organisation, covering persona, casting an actor, recording their speech and training the model, after which the voice is released to that customer's AWS account. It starts with an AWS account manager rather than an upload	Yes, from about 15 seconds of audio
Real-time use	Yes, the API returns an audio stream that an application can begin playing as it arrives, in near real time, with a choice of sampling rates to trade bandwidth against audio quality	Yes, Octave 2 streaming with latency as low as about 100ms
Languages	Voices in 42 languages and language variants, from Arabic and Cantonese to Icelandic and Korean. Which of the four engines a given voice supports differs by voice, and the Generative and Long-Form engines cover far fewer voices than Standard and Neural	Octave 2 in 11 languages
Speech-to-speech and dubbing	No. Polly synthesises speech from text and nothing else. Transcription and translation are separate AWS services rather than features of this one	Yes, the EVI empathic voice interface
Editing and controls	SSML for phrasing, emphasis, intonation, pitch, rate and volume, custom Amazon SSML tags such as the Newscaster speaking style, custom lexicons that set the pronunciation of particular words through IPA-style phonemes, and Speech Marks metadata for speech-synchronised facial animation or word highlighting	Voice design from text prompts (English), plus emotional expression from context
Consent and trust	Brand Voice is a managed engagement rather than an upload, so a custom voice exists only where an actor has been cast and recorded for that purpose, and the finished voice is restricted to the commissioning organisation's AWS account IDs. There is no self-service cloning path that could be pointed at a voice without its owner taking part	Cloning requires filling out a legal agreement confirming you hold the rights or consent for the sample, and use is bound by Hume's Terms of Use and Ethical Guidelines
Deployment	Cloud (SaaS), Browser-based	Cloud (SaaS), Browser-based
Support	Not stated	Community forum
Onboarding	Documentation and knowledge base	Documentation and knowledge base
Company size	Freelancers, Small and mid-sized, Enterprise	Freelancers, Small and mid-sized, Enterprise

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Row where the values differ The small markers point at the lower number, the longer list or the stated feature. They describe the data, they are not a verdict.

The short version

Key Differences

Starting price Amazon Polly Free tier, then from $4 per 1 million characters Hume AI Free tier; paid from $3 / month
Free trial Amazon Polly AWS Free Tier: 5 million Standard characters a month, plus 1 million Neural, 500,000 Long-Form and 100,000 Generative characters a month for the first 12 months Hume AI Free tier with 10,000 TTS characters and 5 minutes of EVI per month
Output Amazon Polly Synthesised speech as MP3, Ogg Vorbis or raw PCM, plus Speech Marks metadata Hume AI Expressive text-to-speech (Octave) and empathic speech-to-speech (EVI)
API Amazon Polly Yes, the Amazon Polly API through the AWS SDKs and the AWS CLI Hume AI Yes
Voice cloning Amazon Polly Brand Voice only, and not as a self-service feature. It is a custom engagement in which the Amazon Polly team builds a Neural voice for the exclusive use of one organisation, covering persona, casting an actor, recording their speech and training the model, after which the voice is released to that customer's AWS account. It starts with an AWS account manager rather than an upload Hume AI Yes, from about 15 seconds of audio

Every line is one datapoint from the table above, picked automatically. Nothing here is written text.

The trade-offs

Strengths and Limitations

Amazon Polly

Strengths

Four voice engines let quality be traded against cost per character, from $4 to $100 per million
Generous free tier, with 5 million Standard characters a month that does not expire
Generated speech may be cached and replayed at no additional cost
Speech Marks and custom lexicons cover lip-sync and awkward pronunciations properly
Brand Voice cannot be used without the voice owner being cast and recorded

Limitations

Text to speech only: no transcription, translation or dubbing in this service
No self-service voice cloning, and Brand Voice starts with an AWS account manager
The Generative and Long-Form engines cover far fewer voices than Standard and Neural
Long-Form voices cost $100 per million characters, twenty-five times the Standard rate
Useful only from code, so it suits developers rather than anyone wanting an editor

Hume AI

Strengths

Expressive, emotionally aware speech
Voice cloning from about 15 seconds and voice design from text prompts
Low-latency streaming for real-time voice agents

Limitations

Voice design and acting instructions are English only or still in preview
Character and EVI-minute caps scale the monthly cost

Plans

Pricing

Amazon Polly

AWS Free Tier Free 5 million Standard characters a month. Neural 1 million, Long-Form 500,000 and Generative 100,000 characters a month for the first 12 months.
Standard voices $4 Per 1 million characters for speech or Speech Marks requests, outside the free tier.
Neural voices $16 Per 1 million characters for speech or Speech Marks requests, outside the free tier.
Generative voices $30 Per 1 million characters for speech requests, outside the free tier.
Long-Form voices $100 Per 1 million characters for speech or Speech Marks requests, outside the free tier.

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Hume AI

Free $0 10,000 TTS characters and 5 minutes of EVI per month.
Starter $3 / month 30,000 TTS characters and 40 minutes of EVI per month.
Creator $14 / month 140,000 TTS characters and 200 minutes of EVI per month; 50% off the first month.
Pro $70 / month 1M TTS characters and 1,200 minutes of EVI per month.
Scale $200 / month 3.3M TTS characters and 5,000 minutes of EVI per month.
Business $500 / month 10M TTS characters and 12,500 minutes of EVI per month.
Enterprise Not stated Custom pricing with unlimited usage.

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What users say

Review Scores · opens after launch

Amazon Polly

Ease of use: Not rated yet
User interface: Not rated yet
Onboarding: Not rated yet
Support and service: Not rated yet
Value for money: Not rated yet
Features: Not rated yet

No reviews yet. Be the first to review this tool. Every review is checked for fairness before it appears, and the vendor cannot have one removed.

Hume AI

Ease of use: Not rated yet
User interface: Not rated yet
Onboarding: Not rated yet
Support and service: Not rated yet
Value for money: Not rated yet
Features: Not rated yet

No reviews yet. Be the first to review this tool. Every review is checked for fairness before it appears, and the vendor cannot have one removed.

Where this comes from

Amazon Polly https://aws.amazon.com/polly/ · checked against the official source on 2026-09-13

Hume AI https://www.hume.ai · no check date recorded yet

This table lists factual criteria taken from information the vendors publish themselves. For how we put it together, see the methodology.