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I spent $300 on a custom AI voice clone that sounds like a robot with a cold
The service promised natural speech but the output is unusable for my project. Has anyone found a decent text-to-speech tool that doesn't cost a fortune?
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david_singh617mo ago
Ugh that's so frustrating! I had the same thing happen with a paid service last year. Honestly I've gotten better results from free tools like ElevenLabs' basic tier. Their free plan gives you a few thousand characters a month in pretty natural voices. For longer projects I use Play.ht because their pricing is clear and the voices actually sound human.
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gray_gibson7mo ago
Yeah, it's like the paid ones expect you to be a sound engineer to get a decent result. I spent an hour tweaking settings on one last month only to get a voice that sounded like a tired robot, which honestly might be an upgrade from my own recording setup, @david_singh61. My microphone is so bad it makes me sound like I'm calling from a submarine. The free tools have been a wake-up call that it shouldn't be that hard or expensive to just sound clear and normal.
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noah_palmer425mo ago
Man the "sounds like a tired robot" thing hit home... I tried this one paid AI voice tool last year and my first attempt came out sounding like a malfunctioning GPS from 2008. Spent another 45 minutes moving sliders around and it still sounded like it was reading a ransom note. Kinda makes you wonder if these companies are just hoping people give up and keep paying.
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