model · OpenAI

OpenAI TTS

OpenAI's TTS models (tts-1 for speed, tts-1-hd for quality) turn text into speech at a price that undercuts almost every competitor — around $0.015 per million characters for tts-1 — which matters if you want to narrate a lot of content, like turning every lecture slide deck into audio. It plugs neatly into anything already using ChatGPT/GPT-4o, so if you're already scripting content with GPT you can pipe the output straight to speech without adding a new vendor. OpenAI also offers gpt-4o-transcribe on the speech-to-text side, so the same account can handle both directions of a voice pipeline. It won't win a blind listening test against ElevenLabs, but for straightforward narration — audio versions of readings, a voice for a chatbot, accessibility read-aloud — it's the practical default because it's cheap and simple.

• byok
• cloud
• Commercial