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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to MARS5, open-source, insanely prosodic TTS model

Hey guys, This is Akshat from CAMB.AI. Today's we're super pumped to introduce MARS5, a fully open-source (commercially usable) TTS with break-through prosody and realism available on our Github: https://www.github.com/camb-ai/mars5-tts Watch our release demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmJSLPYrKtE Why is it different? MARS5 is able to replicate performances (from 2-3s of audio reference) in 140+ languages, even for extremely tough prosodic scenarios like sports commentary, movies, anime and more; hard prosody that most closed-source and…

MARS5 is an open-source text-to-speech model that generates speech in over 140 languages with advanced prosody control. It uses 2-3 seconds of audio reference to replicate speaking styles, handling demanding scenarios… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. MARS5, open-source, insanely prosodic TTS model launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1
    MARS5 TTS▲489

    Open-source, insanely prosodic text-to-speech model

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Kitten TTS is an open-source series of tiny and expressive text-to-speech models for on-device applications. We are excited to launch a preview of our smallest model, which is less than 25 MB. This model has 15M parameters. This release supports English text-to-speech applications in eight voices: four male and four female. The model is quantized to int8 + fp16, and it uses onnx for runtime. The model is designed to run literally anywhere eg. raspberry pi, low-end smartphones, wearables, browsers etc. No GPU required! We're releasing this to give early users a sense of the latency and voices…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Hey there, I’m Brian. I've been shipping conversational models over here at Tavus for the past two years. I want to tell you about our new audio-understanding model: Sparrow-2! It’s a new category of model and a unique new approach to conversational audio. Earlier this year we launched Sparrow-1, (at the time) our SoTA turn taking model. Since our Sparrow-1 launch, I’ve spent a lot of time listening to humans talking and trying to really understand how people know when to talk, when to listen, and when to wait. I’ve also been hunting down failure modes of the current SoTA models. And while…

    2024 · tavus.io · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    A TTS model capable of generating ultra-realistic dialogue in one pass. - nari-labs/dia

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5
    Inworld TTSfree tier, from $25/mo▲318

    Hey HN, this is Igor, one of the engineers behind Inworld Runtime, which we're releasing today in public preview. We built it to solve the common problem we and our customers had: engineers spend more time on AI ops and plumbing than on actual feature development. This was often due to the challenge of using Python for I/O-bound, high-concurrency workloads and complexity maintaining pipelines with streams that use always-changing ML models. Our solution is a high-performance runtime written in C++ with the core idea of defining AI logic as graphs. For instance, a basic voice-to-voice…

    2025 · inworld.ai · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Luke from ElevenLabs here. We just released Scribe Realtime v2, our new real-time Speech to Text model. We rebuilt it from the ground up around a new architecture that uses predictive transcription – it anticipates the next likely word before it’s spoken. That makes it both fast (around 150 ms latency) and highly accurate. Scribe v2 Realtime outperforms every low latency transcription model across 30 commonly used EU and Asian languages – 93.5% accuracy, compared to Gemini 2.5 Flash (91.4%), GPT-4o MiniTranscribe (90.7%), and Deepgram Nova 3 (85%). It supports 90+ languages including…

    2025 · elevenlabs.io · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Build Powerful Voice Agents

    2025 · openai.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Open-source TTS with emotion & voice cloning

    2025 · canopylabs.ai · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Tighter instruction adherence in speech agents

    Feb 2026 · developers.openai.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Have a natural, spoken conversation with AI! Contribute to KoljaB/RealtimeVoiceChat development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Free AI transcription: convert video and audio to text, translate into 120 languages, download SRT, VTT, ASS or TXT, or export the video with subtitles on it.

    2022 · freesubtitles.ai · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    First TTS model to support all 22 Indic languages + English

    2024 · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Fast, accurate STT for production-grade voice agents

    May 2026 · ringg.ai · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    I wanted to share our new speech to text model, and the library to use them effectively. We're a small startup (six people, sub-$100k monthly GPU budget) so I'm proud of the work the team has done to create streaming STT models with lower word-error rates than OpenAI's largest Whisper model. Admittedly Large v3 is a couple of years old, but we're near the top the HF OpenASR leaderboard, even up against Nvidia's Parakeet family. Anyway, I'd love to get feedback on the models and software, and hear about what people might build with it.

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    The voice for your real-time AI applications

    2025 · kyutai.org · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Convert text to speech with natural voices free online

    2024 · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Highly expressive TTS model with high fidelity voice cloning

    2025 · zyphra.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Transcribe and export to VTT and SRT for free

    2024 · its alternatives →

  19. 19
    Juno▲167

    Juno is the local voice layer for Mac with live transcription, Voice Actions, Voice Commands, private offline dictation after setup, and no subscription or paid tier.

    Jun 2026 · usejuno.co · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Our goal with this project is to build a completely open source, state of the art turn detection model that can be used in any voice AI application. I've been experimenting with LLM voice conversations since GPT-4 was first released. (There's a previous front page Show HN about Pipecat, the open source voice AI orchestration framework I work on. [1]) It's been almost two years, and for most of that time, I've been expecting that someone would "solve" turn detection. We all built initial, pretty good 80/20 versions of turn detection on top of VAD (voice activity detection) models. And…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Real-time text-to-speech model you can self-host

    May 2026 · kugelaudio.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    The most accurate streaming speech model for voice agents.

    Mar 2026 · assemblyai.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    AI-powered speech to text, tts, & translation Mac app

    Oct 2025 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Ultra-Realistic AI Voice Model for Dialogue

    2025 · dia-tts.com · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →