A Much Simpler Alternative to Watson Text To Speech

The more, the merrier? Not always! Murf Studio's easy-to-navigate, simple UI facilitates users to be more creative and expressive with their text to speech needs.
Best Alternatives to IBM Watson Text to speech for 2024 | MURF AI

Murf vs Watson: A Text to Speech Software Showdown

Murf's cutting-edge text to speech tool has everything you need to create mind-blowing videos with lifelike, studio-quality voiceovers. From warm, authoratative voices for your advertisements to compelling voices for your marketing video or brand campaigns to clear and precise narration for your PowerPoint presentation, Murf has voices across different styles and emotions.
Free plan
Ability to Add Media to Voiceover
Chrome Extension
API
Voice Cloning
Voice Changer
Commercial Usage
Custom Pronunciation
Audio File Formats Supported
wav, flac, mp3
mp3, ogg, wav, webm, mulaw, meg, flac and more
Multimedia Editor

What is IBM Watson Text To Speech?

IBM Watson text to speech service converts written text to natural-sounding speech that can be used in a variety of voice-driven applications, such as voice-automated chatbots, as well as tools for the disabled or visually impaired, video narration, and educational and home-automation solutions, among others. Watson TTS has both male and female voices in 13 different languages. The software also provides an API that uses neural voice technology to process natural-sounding voices from written text.

Additionally, Watson text to speech also provides facilities for storing data on secured servers. A Lite version of the application is available for free use, where users get access to easily convert 10,000 characters per month. Furthermore, for a fee, IBM also offers a standard and premium plan.

A notable feature of Watson TTS is that businesses can personalize the software's synthetic voices to reflect human-like terminology and tone. The service not only helps in improving accessibility but also automating customer service interactions to reduce wait times. 

Moreover, in IBM Waston TTS, you can even use SSML tags to customize the speech output. SSML allows users to specify pronunciation, volume, pitch, speed, and other vocal attributes. 

Top Features of IBM Watson Text to Speech

Natural Sounding Neural Voices

IBM Watson text to speech offers a range of neural voices closely mimicking human speech. They are generated using advanced deep-learning techniques, producing smooth and natural-sounding voice quality.

Design Your Custom Voice

Watson text to speech lets you create your own neural voice for a consistent and personalized voice experience. You can model the voice after your chosen speaker by training the system with just an hour of the speaker's recording.

Controllable Speech Attributes

You can control various speech attributes, such as pitch, pronunciation, speech, and volume, using speech synthesis markup language. The fine-tuning ensures the generated voice matches your specific requirement.

Customized Word Pronunciation

Watson lets you specify the pronunciation of unusual words with the help of IPA or IBM SPR. You can ensure accurate and contextually appropriate pronunciation for specialized vocabularies.

Expressiveness

With Watson, you can also infuse various expressions into your generated speech. You can choose a specific speaking style, such as GoodNews, Apology, and Uncertainty, to express happiness, sadness, excitement, and more.

Voice Transformation

Voice transformation is another notable feature of this text to speech software. Users can personalize the output by specifying attributes such as strength, pitch, and breathiness to match a specific speaking style or persona.

Top IBM Watson Text to Speech Alternatives

An all-around text to speech software should do more than just convert your text to speech and enable you to create compelling voiceovers to engage customers. It should allow both personal and professional users to give shape to their marketing ideas, creative campaigns, storytelling, and more by letting them create content from scratch with natural-sounding voices in different languages. Below are some of the best alternatives to Watson text to speech service:

Murf

Murf is a text to speech tool that enhances the quality of your voiceovers using subtle, life like voices that resemble human speech patterns. The software can be used for both business and personal use. Murf offers three more premium plans in addition to its free plan, which users can enroll in on an annual or monthly basis.

Anyone can use Murf's feature-packed studio to convert text into natural-sounding speech and then create quality voice over videos. Its feature-rich platform enables you to make studio-quality videos from the comfort of your home. Additionally, Murf also offers an API that can be integrated into speech-enabled products and services.

With Murf, you can take your marketing game to the next level using its advanced voice customization features. Fine-tune your voiceover with features like pitch, pause, emphasis, and pronunciation. Murf offers a wide variety of AI voices in more than 20 languages, including but not limited to, Swedish, German, Hindi, Chinese, Turkish, and much more.

Amazon Polly

A part of the Amazon AI suite, Polly is a cloud-based speech service that helps convert written text into audio in more than 24 different languages. It is a developer's dream because Polly's simple-to-use API can quickly integrate speech synthesis into any system and enable businesses to build speech-enabled applications targetting different geographies. Amazon Polly has a wide range of 47 different voices in multiple dialects; this enables organizations to create content that caters to specific regions. Polly supports standard audio file formats such as MP3 and OGG. Amazon charges Polly on a 'pay-per-use' basis based on the number of text characters that are turned into audio. 

That said, Polly also offers other customization features like the 'Brand Voice' and 'Custom Lexicon.' Brand voice is particularly useful when companies want to differentiate their products and applications with a unique vocal identity. On the other hand, businesses can modify the pronunciation of specific words, such as company and product names, using the custom lexicon feature. 

Azure text to speech

The Microsoft Azure text to speech service uses the software giant's advanced AI and machine-learning capabilities to convert written text into natural-sounding speech with high accuracy. The application supports voices in more than 140 languages and can be used for anything from audio content creation to customer service to voice assistants. You can use up to 0.5 million characters per month for free.

Azure TTS service supports both SDK and API. The availability of both makes it a potent tool for developers, especially those building mobile apps. It gives them the freedom to integrate text to speech services into different aspects of their products. It further allows users to fine-tune their speech output with  SSML tags to fit different scenarios.

Google Cloud Text to Speech

This Google-powered text to speech API lets businesses build speech-enabled applications like IVR systems, chatbots, and much more and process natural-sounding speech from written text in more than 200 voices across multiple languages and dialects. Google Cloud text to speech also offers an interesting feature to train a custom voice model using your own studio-quality audio recordings to create a unique voice.

Google's TTS API delivers high-quality speech by leveraging DeepMind's groundbreaking research in WaveNet and Google's powerful neural networks. The platform allows users to customize their speech output with text and SSML support. 

Speechify

Speechify allows users to read aloud web pages, documents, PDFs, emails, articles, ebooks, and more. The TTS tool is extremely useful for people with learning disabilities like Dyslexia, ADHD, or visual impairments. Users can customize their experience by changing the language and accent of the voiceover, as well as slowing down or increasing the reading speed easily. Speechify offers text to speech voices in 30+ languages across different accents. 

One notable feature is the availability of a browser extension, which activates the application on most web pages with text. It becomes particularly helpful to people who read on the internet. To make things even better, the application highlights the sentence and word as it reads, making it easy for the reader to follow and not get distracted.

While Speechify doesn't have a free version available, after creating an account, users can access the tool for free for three days, after which they have to subscribe to use the tool by paying $139 per year.

15.ai

15.ai is another impressive alternative to IBM Watson text to speech, with a knack for creating natural high-fidelity emotive voices. It generates custom voices by using fictional characters from various movies, TV shows, and other media.

The best feature of 15.ai is its ability to convert text to speech in real-time. As soon as you enter the text content onto the platform and choose a voice, the platform creates the voiceover right away. It uses advanced audio synthesis algorithms, deep neural networks, machine learning, and sentiment analysis model to produce fast, high-quality output.

The application also supports manual altering of the emotion of the speech generated using emotional contextualizers. With its user-friendly platform and non-commercial nature, users can easily create content for their websites, mobile apps, or social media feeds.

FakeYou

FakeYou is another online free text to speech platform that can easily create deep fakes. The AI voice program uses machine learning to develop a realistic-sounding voice from popular culture.

FakeYou offers a wide range of unique voice cloning options, with over 2,000 choices available. You can imitate various personalities, including popular figures like Donald Trump, Elsa, and Hulk, or any other character from movies and TV shows.

A big plus point of FakeYou is its easy-to-use interface. Simply open the FakeYou website, copy-paste the text into the dialogue box, choose your favorite character from their catalog, and click 'speak' to hear the text translated into speech.

With FakeYou, you can professionally clone any voice and use it to convey your message in a fun and captivating manner.

TTS Reader

As the name suggests, TTS Reader is a tool to read aloud any text document, be it web pages, pdfs, or ebooks. The online reader translates text to voice, transforming ebooks into audiobooks, web pages into narrations, and online text into audio files.

TTS reader has an intuitive user interface with several features. It automatically highlights the text being read out, making it easier for the listeners to follow. The software also provides the functionality to correct pronunciation or skip sentences and paragraphs while reading.

To use TTS, users can enter their text or the website URL into the dialogue box. The tool will take the plain text from the article on the website and translate it into high-quality audio in the language and accent of their choice.

While TTS Reader is free for non-commercial purposes, you may need a premium subscription to use it commercially.

Lovo AI

Lovo AI is another compelling alternative to Watson text to speech. With a user-friendly interface, Lovo AI software enables quick conversion of written text into speech in over 33 languages. The generated audio files can be downloaded in all major audio file formats.

Lovo has an extensive library of over 400 natural voices and can generate over 30 types of emotions. This versatility makes Lovo AI ideal for eLearning content, games, advertisements, films, and more. It also offers fine-tuning options so you can customize the speed, emphasis, pronunciation, and pauses of the synthesized speech to your liking.

While the free trial version of Lovo AI offers unlimited script conversions, you must switch to monthly plans for extended voice generation time and download options.

Uberduck AI

The last alternative on our list is Uberduck. Users can access a range of features from the Underduck dashboard, including text to speech conversions, custom voice cloning, Tacotron notebook creation, and the ability to generate raps or 'AI sing' using synthesized voices.

What makes Uberduck interesting is the inclusion of several celebrity voices in its options, from Mickey Mouse to Kanye West and Jay-Z. Further, this AI voice generator service has an active community on GitHub and Discord. It means new voices are continually added to the Uberduck library, synthesized by users like you.

Its large library of voices and many interesting features make it an excellent alternative to Watson.

What Makes Murf Text to Speech So Special?

Murf is the ultimate creator-friendly text to speech tool out there. From using the studio to enhance customer service processes to creating world-class videos for any project, users can do it all with Murf. Deploy features like voice cloning and voice editing to add more creativity to your content, and take it a level above by adjusting pitch, speed, emphasis, and interjections! Choose from over 120+ text to speech voices in 20+ languages to create content that screams top-class creativity.

Why Murf over Watson?

Well, to begin with, Murf is easier to use, and the signup process is pretty straightforward. Murf offers a host of functionalities to users both freelancers and companies can use the studio to create videos with a compelling voiceover from scratch. For example, you can write a script, choose the preferred voice in the language and dialect of your choice, add it to a video, and viola! Your project will be ready for download in a matter of minutes. 

With Murf, you won't require SSML to add life to your audio files. You can simply play with voice customization features like emphasis, pronunciation, speed, and pitch available in the Studio. Not just that, Murf also provides a ton of royalty-free music for users to add to their videos. Furthermore, it also allows the import of videos and music from external platforms like YouTube and more.  

That's not all! There are a few other features that make Murf a better alternative to IBM Watson:

Voice Over Video

Murf empowers you to work faster and be more creative. With Murf, you can create studio-quality voice over videos from the comfort of your home or neighborhood cafe. Open the studio, drop in your video, upload a script and choose from the custom voices! That's literally the recipe for your next marketing masterpiece.

Voice Changer

We know that when creating a video, you may need to record your voice, and we understand that when you listen to your recording, you may not like the result! Well, worry not because, with Murf's voice changer feature, you can simply swap your home recording with an AI voice with a professional tone. You can also edit out any undesirable sounds, interruptions, or errors made during the recording process too.

Final Verdict?

While IBM Watson text to speech has almost every tool to help a business meet its TTS needs, Murf offers all of them and more through a much simpler interface. Murf makes it much easier to create studio-quality voiceover videos with minimal input. A user-friendly interface coupled with easy-to-navigate functionality makes Murf Studio a must-have for companies and individuals who wish to make stunning voiceovers quickly and easily.

Frequently Asked Questions


Is IBM Watson TTS free?

There is a Lite Version that can be used for free; users can use up to 10,000 characters a month.

What is IBM Watson used for now?

IBM Watson is used to improve customer experience. It provides call analytics that enables businesses to accurately identify emerging call patterns, customer complaints, sentiment, non-compliant behavior, and more. And there is no need for real people to make these calls.

How much does IBM Watson cost?

There are four pricing tiers. The Lite level can be used for free and lets you use up to 10,000 characters a month. The Standard level is offered at USD 0.02 per thousand characters. For the premium versions, you need to contact IBM, as the charges are based on the requirements.


Read more about the best text to speech software, best text to speech chrome extensions, and best text to speech apps available online and their advantages.

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