Cartesia Sonic vs SpeakSay
Cartesia Sonic
cartesia.aiSpeakSay
speaksay.comSide by side
| Figure | Cartesia Sonic | SpeakSay |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $5/mo | $10/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 6 | 5 |
| Spec score · Game Voice Generators | 8.6 (#12) | 7.7 (#28) |
| Commercial use | Yes | SpeakSay says audio generated on paid plans includes a full commercial license. |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States | Ashton-under-Lyne, United Kingdom |
| Support | Cartesia's documentation directs users to Discord to chat with the Cartesia team and community for help. | The pricing page lists community support for Free, priority 36-hour customer support for Pro, and priority 24-hour email support for Studio. |
| Voice cloning | Instant voice cloning can use 10 seconds of audio, while Pro Voice Clone training uses 30 minutes or more from one speaker. | Users can upload a voice sample and generate speech in the cloned voice. |
Plans
Cartesia Sonic
- FreeFree
- Pro$5 a month
- Startup$49 a month
- Scale$299 a month
- FreeFree
- EnterprisePriced on request
SpeakSay
- FreeFree
- Lite$10 a month
- Pro$17 a month
- Studio$24 a month
- Lifetime$150, paid once
In their own words
Cartesia Sonic
Cartesia Sonic is a text-to-speech model for real-time voice applications, available through the web and an API. It has sub-90ms latency and supports 44 languages. Sonic can interpret emotional subtext and add non-verbal expressions such as laughter to transcripts. Its localization feature carries emotion, tone, and speaker identity into another language, while custom pronunciation dictionaries let users set how proper nouns and domain terms are spoken. For voice agents, Managed Agents combine Ink-2 speech-to-text, a selected LLM, and Sonic-3.6 text-to-speech, with turn-taking and interruption handling. Phone connectivity can use Cartesia-provisioned numbers, imported Twilio numbers, or a carrier over SIP. Cartesia lists HIPAA compliance, SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, and PCI. It says Sonic can be deployed on-premise, in a customer VPC on AWS, GCP, or Azure, or through OEM licensing. A free plan includes 20K credits per month and two concurrent text-to-speech requests. Paid plans start at $5/mo; higher tiers raise credit allowances and list capabilities including organizations and priority support.