Acapela Group vs ESPnet
Acapela Group
acapela-group.com
ESPnet
espnet.github.ioSide by side
| Figure | Acapela Group | ESPnet |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | €8.25/mo | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 9 | 2 |
| Spec score · Text-to-Speech Software | 9.3 (#2) | 8.9 (#17) |
| Spec score · Text-to-speech tools | 9.2 (#9) | 8.8 (#28) |
| API access | Yes | Yes |
| Commercial use | Yes | Yes |
| Platforms | web,windows,macos,linux,ios,android,api | The installation guide lists Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Windows 10, and macOS 12 as supported distributions or systems, with Windows and macOS marked installation only. |
| Voice cloning | Yes | No |
| What it does | Acapela provides text-to-speech and digital voice solutions for applications, devices and services, including custom and personalized voices. | ESPnet is an end-to-end speech-processing toolkit for recognition, synthesis, translation, enhancement, diarization, spoken-language understanding and related tasks. |
Plans
Acapela Group
- Yearly subscription€99 a year
- One-time license€999 a month
- Acapela Android voice€3.99, paid once
- Acapela TTS voices for Google Play€3.99, paid once
- My-Own-Voice yearly subscription€99 a year
- My-Own-Voice one-time licence€999, paid once
- Virtual Speaker€1,500, paid once
- Virtual Speaker first prepaid package€1,500, paid once
- Acapela TTS voices for NVDA€5,999, paid once
In their own words
Acapela Group
Acapela Group creates synthetic voices that turn written content into speech for services, apps, and devices. Its portfolio includes more than 250 voices in over 30 languages, with voice cloning, API access, and commercial use supported. Customer interaction products can be deployed through cloud, sovereign cloud, on-premises, or embedded setups. Acapela Cloud provides a web interface for creating and editing AI voice prompts and organizing files by project. Developers can use the Windows Server toolkit with proprietary APIs, SAPI5,.NET, C/C++, Java, MRCP v2, and W3C SSML. Rule-based pronunciation and lexicon tools allow specific terms to be tuned across languages. Acapela identifies voice agents and interactive voice response systems as use cases, and its NVDA voices serve blind and vision-impaired computer users. Platforms include Android, API, iOS, Linux, macOS, self-hosted, web, and Windows. The yearly subscription is €99 a year, billed excluding VAT; a three-month voice evaluation is included. Acapela is based in Mons, Belgium.
ESPnet
ESPnet is an open-source toolkit for speech processing, including recognition, text-to-speech, translation, enhancement, speaker diarization, and spoken language understanding. It provides complete recipes for a range of tasks, plus tutorials, notebooks, and demos for existing models. Users can install ESPnet and espnet-model-zoo with pip to run inference on existing models; published models can also run in CPU or GPU inference containers without checking out the repository. Installation supports editable pip setup and optional dependency groups for tasks such as ASR, TTS, and speech enhancement. Training requires a separate extra that includes Lightning, TensorBoard, W&B, torch_optimizer, matplotlib, and Dask. Some task-specific packages must also be installed separately when a recipe needs them. ESPnet 1 is no longer supported, while ESPnet2 users can skip installing Kaldi. The toolkit is released under Apache License 2.0 and permits commercial use. It offers API access and lists Linux, macOS, Windows, and self-hosted platforms; WAV is the listed export format.