Best for
Best for teams putting AI voice agents on real phone lines and testing them before they meet customers.
- Small and mid-sized
- Enterprise
AI Voice & Speech Comparison
Retell AI vs. Typecast
At a glance
At a glance
Best for
Best for creators who want expressive, emotion-controlled voiceover for video, audiobooks and podcasts.
- Freelancers
- Small and mid-sized
- Enterprise
Cataleo does not name a winner. Both statements come from the vendors themselves.
Full Comparison
| Criterion | Retell AI | Typecast |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | lower value From $0.07 / minute of calls Pay as you go, quoted by the vendor as $0.07 to $0.31 per minute for voice agents depending on the models, telephony and add-ons chosen, plus from $0.002 per message for chat agents. Enterprise is quoted by sales. | Free tier; Basic from $5 / month Credit-based. The free tier offers trial voices only and requires attribution; commercial use starts on Basic. |
| Free trial | $10 in free credits, no contract and no commitment; 20 concurrent calls are included | Free tier with 3,000 lifetime credits (around 5 minutes), trial voices only |
| Commercial use | Yes, usage-based | Paid (Basic and above) |
| Output | Voice agents for inbound and outbound phone calls and web calls, plus chat agents over SMS and a web widget | Expressive AI speech with emotion and dynamics control; video export on paid tiers |
| API | Yes, REST API with Node.js and Python libraries, webhooks and an MCP server | Yes |
| Hosting | Cloud on AWS; the vendor states it does not currently operate services within the European Union | Not stated |
| Voice cloning | Yes, custom voices can be added by searching ElevenLabs community voices, importing an existing clone or training one from uploaded recordings, with Inworld, Cartesia, MiniMax, ElevenLabs and Retell's own platform clones as providers; up to 100 custom voices per account | Yes, instant and professional cloning; slots scale from one to ten by plan |
| Real-time use | Yes, live inbound and outbound phone calls and browser web calls, with a proprietary turn-taking model, batch calling for campaigns and live monitoring that lets a human listen in or step in | Yes, real-time generation via the API |
| Languages | 57 languages are listed for text-to-speech and 55 for speech recognition, and a language needs a provider on both sides to be usable. An agent runs either in a single language or as a multilingual agent across a chosen set | 35+ languages |
| Speech-to-speech and dubbing | A call runs as spoken conversation by chaining speech recognition, a language model and text-to-speech; dubbing of existing recordings is not part of the product | Not documented: the API covers text-to-speech, streaming playback, word- and character-level timestamps and voice cloning from a sample, with no voice-conversion or dubbing endpoint |
| Editing and controls | Single and multi-prompt agents or node-based conversation flows, knowledge bases, expressive mode for emotion and emphasis, custom pronunciation with IPA, CMU, Pinyin or Jyutping, denoising and interruption sensitivity, voicemail and IVR handling, plus a playground, simulation tests, A/B testing and post-call analysis | Emotion, pitch, intensity, speed and dynamics |
| Consent and trust | HIPAA compliant, SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 certified and GDPR compliant, with a BAA and a DPA including EU standard contractual clauses available for self-signing at no extra fee. Per-agent data retention runs from 1 day to 2 years, PII can be excluded from what is stored, and recording URLs can be signed. Services are not currently operated inside the EU | Every voice actor on the platform has agreed to the use cases for their voice and keeps ownership of the model. Uploading a sample requires confirming permission for any third-party voice in it, and cloned voices stay private |
| MCP-ready | stated Yes | No |
| Deployment | Cloud (SaaS), Browser-based | Cloud (SaaS), Browser-based |
| Support | Not stated | Email helpdesk |
| Onboarding | Documentation and knowledge base | Documentation and knowledge base |
| Company size | Small and mid-sized, Enterprise | more entries Freelancers, Small and mid-sized, Enterprise |
| Integrations | Twilio, Telnyx, Vonage, Genesys Cloud, Five9, Avaya, Amazon Connect, HubSpot, Make, n8n, GoHighLevel | Not stated |
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The short version
Key Differences
- Starting price Retell AI From $0.07 / minute of calls Typecast Free tier; Basic from $5 / month
- Free trial Retell AI $10 in free credits, no contract and no commitment; 20 concurrent calls are included Typecast Free tier with 3,000 lifetime credits (around 5 minutes), trial voices only
- Company size Retell AI Small and mid-sized, Enterprise Typecast Freelancers, Small and mid-sized, Enterprise
- MCP-ready Retell AI Yes Typecast No
- Commercial use Retell AI Yes, usage-based Typecast Paid (Basic and above)
Every line is one datapoint from the table above, picked automatically. Nothing here is written text.
The trade-offs
Strengths and Limitations
Retell AI
Strengths
- Usage-based per-minute pricing with no contract and $10 in free credits to start
- Testing tooling built into the product: playground, simulation runs, batch tests and A/B splits of live traffic
- Custom voices can be cloned or imported across several voice providers
- HIPAA, SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 and GDPR, with BAA and DPA available for self-signing at no extra fee
Limitations
- The per-minute rate varies widely with the models, telephony and add-ons chosen, so the entry rate is not the rate to budget with
- The vendor states it does not currently operate services within the European Union
- Retell-managed phone numbers cover the US and Canada only; elsewhere a number has to be brought in
- Building and running an agent assumes developer work; there is no packaged seat-based plan
Typecast
Strengths
- 700+ voices with fine emotion and delivery control
- Context-aware emotion model adapts tone to the script
- Affordable entry with a commercial license from $5 per month
Limitations
- Free tier is limited to trial voices and requires attribution
- Credit allowances are modest on the lower tiers
Plans
Pricing
Retell AI
- Pay as you go $0.07 Per minute and up, quoted by the vendor as $0.07 to $0.31 per minute for voice agents and from $0.002 per message for chat agents. Includes $10 in free credits and 20 concurrent calls, with no contract.
- Enterprise Not stated Contact sales. Custom pricing for higher volumes, with dedicated support and implementation, custom compliance terms covering HIPAA, SSO and a DPA, no cap on concurrent calls and a dedicated server option.
Typecast
- Free $0 3,000 lifetime credits (around 5 minutes), trial voices only, attribution required.
- Basic $5 / month $54 / year. 30,000 credits per month (around 35 minutes), all AI voices, commercial license, 1 instant cloning slot.
- Plus $19 / month $204 / year. 40,000 credits per month, speed control, 1 professional cloning slot.
- Pro $29 / month $312 / year. 75,000 credits per month, emotion and intonation controls, 2 cloning slots.
- Business $69 / month $744 / year. 200,000 credits per month, 10 cloning slots, additional credit purchases.
- Enterprise Not stated Custom pricing.
What users say
Review Scores · opens after launch
Retell 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.
Typecast
- 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
Retell AI https://www.retellai.com · checked against the official source on 2026-09-13
Typecast https://typecast.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.