Simba 3.2, the flagship streaming text-to-speech model from Speechify’s developer platform, is ranked first on the independent Artificial Analysis TTS leaderboard, above flagship models from ElevenLabs, Cartesia, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind, and joint second on Voice Arena’s blind listener rankings, making it the highest-rated real-time text-to-speech model and the least expensive in the leaderboard’s top ten, at $10 per million characters, dropping to $6 per million at scale.
NEW YORK, July 7, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — Speechify, the voice AI company behind the SpeechifyAI developer platform, today announced that its flagship text-to-speech model, Simba 3.2, has reached first place on the Artificial Analysis text-to-speech leaderboard, ranking above flagship models from ElevenLabs, Cartesia, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind, and joint second place on Voice Arena, two independent benchmarks that evaluate TTS models across the industry.
Simba 3.2 is ranked first on the Artificial Analysis text-to-speech leaderboard and joint second on Voice Arena’s blind listener rankings, making it the highest-rated real-time text-to-speech model available at its $6 per million character starting price.
Neither benchmark is operated by Speechify, and neither uses self-reported numbers. Both leaderboards update as new models ship, and both placed Simba 3.2 at or near the top of the field this week.
What the Rankings Show
The Artificial Analysis leaderboard (https://artificialanalysis.ai/text-to-speech/leaderboard) runs a consistent, objective evaluation across commercially available text-to-speech models and is widely tracked across the voice AI industry. Simba 3.2 currently holds first place, ahead of every evaluated model from ElevenLabs, Cartesia, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and dozens of other commercial voice AI providers.
Voice Arena (https://voicearena.com/) ranks models through blind listener voting. Simba 3.2 currently sits joint second. Of the models ranked at or above it, one does not operate in real time, and the model tied with it is priced at roughly seven times Simba 3.2’s rate. Among real-time models that teams can deploy in production today, Simba 3.2 is the highest-rated option at its price point: $10 per one million characters on its entry tier, and $6 per one million characters on its Scale tier.
How Voice Arena Evaluates Text to Speech
Voice Arena uses the same evaluation approach that Chatbot Arena established as the standard for ranking large language models. Panels of native speakers hear two audio clips generated from identical text, without knowing which model produced which, and vote for the clip that sounds more natural. Votes are aggregated into an Elo rating for each model.
The methodology (https://voicearena.com/tts-methodology) is stricter than most public TTS evaluations. It covers six languages, uses a balanced voice slate per model rather than each vendor’s best-sounding default, and evaluates sentences written for the contexts where text to speech actually ships. The methodology was developed with advice from Prof. Shinji Watanabe of Carnegie Mellon University.
There is no self-reported mean opinion score, no vendor-selected sample, and no internal evaluation. The rankings reflect objective measurement and blind human listening.
Why the Result Matters for Real-Time Applications
For teams building voice agents, live readers, phone systems, and other applications where the voice responds in real time, a model that cannot stream is not a candidate regardless of how it sounds. Removing non-real-time models from the Voice Arena rankings leaves Simba 3.2 as the top-rated voice a team can put in production today at its price.
Best-sounding real-time and lowest-cost do not usually describe the same model. At $10 per one million characters on its entry tier, the price Artificial Analysis lists on the leaderboard, Simba 3.2 is the least expensive model in the leaderboard’s top ten. On the Scale tier the rate drops to $6 per one million characters, pricing built for production volume rather than demos. Full pricing is available at https://speechify.ai/pricing.
“This is the underdog story for API providers,” said Luke Oliff, Head of Developer Relations at Speechify. “We spent years making our models run efficiently because our consumer business demanded it, tens of millions of listeners, with some of the best voices on the planet. That work is why we can now put the best-rated model in the world on our API at about as cheap as it comes. Most labs built for the benchmark and priced for the enterprise. We built for listeners and priced for production.”
“As an undergrad at Stanford, CS229 with Andrew Ng sparked my interest in ML. My course project was fine-tuning Tacotron 2. My team’s new model at Speechify just hit SOTA, five years later. It’s pretty surreal looking back,” said Tyler Weitzman, Co-Founder, President and Head of AI at Speechify, in a post on X.
What Simba 3.2 Offers Developers
Simba 3.2 is a streaming-native model with lower time-to-first-byte than previous generations, fine-grained emotional control, and SSML prosody support. Emotion is modeled at the prosody level, covering the rhythmic and tonal patterns that convey feeling rather than only speed and pitch. The model supports instant voice cloning from short reference clips and native-quality speech across more than 30 locales, with mixed-language input handled automatically.
The model is available through the SpeechifyAI platform via a REST API and first-party TypeScript and Python SDKs, documented at https://docs.speechify.ai. This is the same API that powers Speechify’s consumer products, serving tens of millions of users.
Migration Support for Teams on Other Providers
For teams currently shipping on other text-to-speech providers, the gap between a better-sounding, lower-cost model and an actual switch involves real engineering work: voices to re-map, SSML to port, and latency to re-verify under production load. Speechify provides tooling and support to close that gap.
The Speechify Cookbook (https://github.com/SpeechifyInc/speechify-api-cookbook) is an open-source repository of runnable migration recipes, with SDK and native REST versions side by side so engineering teams can see exactly what goes over the wire. For customers with production volume, Speechify’s forward-deployed engineers (https://speechify.ai/forward-deployed-engineers) embed with the customer’s team and handle voice mapping, prosody parity, load testing, and cutover until quality holds at scale.
Availability
Simba 3.2 is available now through the SpeechifyAI platform. Developers can create a free API key at https://platform.speechify.ai and compare Simba 3.2 against any other model on their own text. Current rankings are published at https://artificialanalysis.ai/text-to-speech/leaderboard and https://voicearena.com, where anyone can participate in blind listener voting.
About Speechify
Speechify is a leading productivity platform serving more than 60 million users worldwide. Its product ecosystem includes Text to Speech, Voice Typing Dictation, AI Podcasts, the Voice AI Assistant, and Speechify Work, an offering that lets professionals delegate complex knowledge work to a team of AI agents. In 2025, Speechify received the Apple Design Award at WWDC, recognized as a critical resource for accessibility and productivity. The SpeechifyAI developer platform provides the same voice technology as an API, including streaming text to speech, instant voice cloning, emotional control, and support for more than 30 languages. Learn more at https://speechify.ai.
Media Contact
Rohan P, Speechify, 1 (747) 302-4454, rohan@speechify.com, speechify.ai
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