Best for
Best for developers on Google Cloud who need speech synthesis in an application and want to pick their own quality and price point.
- Freelancers
- Small and mid-sized
- Enterprise
AI Voice & Speech Comparison
Google Cloud Text-to-Speech vs. Hume AI
At a glance
At a glance
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 | Google Cloud Text-to-Speech | Hume AI |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | Free tier, then from $4 per 1 million characters Pay-as-you-go by characters sent for synthesis, counting spaces, newlines and most SSML tags, with a free monthly allowance per voice type. Standard and WaveNet $4 per 1 million characters, free to 4 million a month. Neural2 and Polyglot $16, Chirp 3 HD $30 and Studio $160, each free to 1 million a month. Instant Custom Voice $60 with no free allowance. Gemini-TTS is billed per token instead, from $0.50 per 1 million input text tokens and $10 per 1 million output audio tokens, also with no free allowance. | lower value Free tier; paid from $3 / month Paid tiers are metered by monthly TTS characters and EVI minutes. |
| Free trial | Free monthly allowance: 4 million characters on Standard and WaveNet voices, 1 million on Chirp 3 HD, Neural2, Polyglot and Studio voices | Free tier with 10,000 TTS characters and 5 minutes of EVI per month |
| Commercial use | Not stated | Yes |
| Output | Synthesised speech, single request, streaming or long-form, as LINEAR16, MP3, OGG_OPUS, ALAW, MULAW, PCM or M4A | Expressive text-to-speech (Octave) and empathic speech-to-speech (EVI) |
| API | Yes, the Cloud Text-to-Speech API with client libraries and a command-line path | Yes |
| Hosting | Cloud (Google Cloud), with a global endpoint and regional endpoints | Not stated |
| Voice cloning | Yes, Chirp 3 Instant Custom Voice builds a personal voice model from a short high-quality recording, usable afterwards for streaming and long-form synthesis. Access is restricted to allow-listed customers and is arranged through the sales team rather than self-service. A cloning key created for en-US can also speak German, US and European Spanish, Canadian and European French and Brazilian Portuguese | Yes, from about 15 seconds of audio |
| Real-time use | Yes, bidirectional streaming synthesis for live use, alongside ordinary single requests and a separate long-form path for large documents | Yes, Octave 2 streaming with latency as low as about 100ms |
| Languages | Google's own figure is 220+ voices across 40+ languages. Chirp 3 HD ships 30 named voices, with Punjabi (India) and Chinese (Hong Kong) still in preview, and Instant Custom Voice supports a shorter list that includes Arabic, Bengali, Mandarin, several English variants and French | Octave 2 in 11 languages |
| Speech-to-speech and dubbing | No. This service synthesises speech from text only. Recognition is the separate Speech-to-Text service and translation the separate Translation AI service | Yes, the EVI empathic voice interface |
| Editing and controls | SSML, pace control from 0.25x to 2x, experimental pause tags and custom pronunciation in IPA or X-SAMPA phonetic encoding, device profiles that tune output for the playback hardware, and text-based prompting on the Gemini-TTS models, which take a written description of the delivery rather than markup | Voice design from text prompts (English), plus emotional expression from context |
| Consent and trust | Instant Custom Voice sits behind an allow list that is granted by the sales team, and enrolment requires the speaker to record a consent statement that Google supplies in the language being cloned, in English: "I am the owner of this voice and I consent to Google using this voice to create a synthetic voice model." The recording is part of the enrolment, so a voice cannot be cloned from found audio | 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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The short version
Key Differences
- Starting price Google Cloud Text-to-Speech Free tier, then from $4 per 1 million characters Hume AI Free tier; paid from $3 / month
- Free trial Google Cloud Text-to-Speech Free monthly allowance: 4 million characters on Standard and WaveNet voices, 1 million on Chirp 3 HD, Neural2, Polyglot and Studio voices Hume AI Free tier with 10,000 TTS characters and 5 minutes of EVI per month
- Output Google Cloud Text-to-Speech Synthesised speech, single request, streaming or long-form, as LINEAR16, MP3, OGG_OPUS, ALAW, MULAW, PCM or M4A Hume AI Expressive text-to-speech (Octave) and empathic speech-to-speech (EVI)
- API Google Cloud Text-to-Speech Yes, the Cloud Text-to-Speech API with client libraries and a command-line path Hume AI Yes
- Voice cloning Google Cloud Text-to-Speech Yes, Chirp 3 Instant Custom Voice builds a personal voice model from a short high-quality recording, usable afterwards for streaming and long-form synthesis. Access is restricted to allow-listed customers and is arranged through the sales team rather than self-service. A cloning key created for en-US can also speak German, US and European Spanish, Canadian and European French and Brazilian Portuguese 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
Google Cloud Text-to-Speech
Strengths
- One API spans cheap legacy voices at $4 per million characters and current HD voices at $30
- Gemini-TTS takes a written prompt for the delivery instead of hand-written SSML markup
- Free monthly character allowance on every voice type except Gemini-TTS and custom voices
- Bidirectional streaming, single request and long-form synthesis from the same service
- Voice cloning requires a recorded consent statement from the speaker, in their own language
Limitations
- Text to speech only: recognition and translation are separate Google Cloud services
- Instant Custom Voice is restricted to allow-listed customers and goes through sales
- Studio voices cost $160 per million characters, forty times the Standard rate
- Gemini-TTS is billed per token rather than per character, so the two price models do not compare directly
- The overlapping generations of voice model take some reading before the right one is obvious
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
Google Cloud Text-to-Speech
- Standard and WaveNet voices $4 Per 1 million characters. Free for the first 4 million characters a month.
- Neural2 and Polyglot voices $16 Per 1 million characters. Free for the first 1 million characters a month. Polyglot is in preview.
- Chirp 3: HD voices $30 Per 1 million characters. Free for the first 1 million characters a month.
- Chirp 3: Instant Custom Voice $60 Per 1 million characters. No free allowance, and access is restricted to allow-listed customers.
- Studio voices $160 Per 1 million characters. Free for the first 1 million characters a month. A legacy model.
- Gemini-TTS Not stated Billed per token with no free allowance. Gemini 2.5 Flash TTS costs $0.50 per 1 million input text tokens and $10 per 1 million output audio tokens; Gemini 2.5 Pro TTS and Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS (preview) cost $1.00 and $20.00 respectively. Audio tokens correspond to 25 tokens per second of audio.
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.
What users say
Review Scores · opens after launch
Google Cloud Text-to-Speech
- 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
Where this comes from
Google Cloud Text-to-Speech https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech · 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.