ESPnet vs iSpeech
ESPnet
espnet.github.ioiSpeech
ispeech.orgSide by side
| Figure | ESPnet | iSpeech |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $0.25/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 2 | 15 |
| Spec score · Text-to-Speech Software | 8.9 (#17) | 9.2 (#6) |
| Spec score · Text-to-speech tools | 8.8 (#28) | 9.2 (#11) |
| API access | Yes | API access requires an API key, with mobile development, mobile production, and web/general production key types. |
| Commercial use | Yes | Yes |
| Export formats | WAV | aiff,mp3,ogg,wma,flac,wav,alaw,ulaw,vox,mp4 |
| Platforms | The installation guide lists Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Windows 10, and macOS 12 as supported distributions or systems, with Windows and macOS marked installation only. | web,ios,android,api |
| What it does | ESPnet is an end-to-end speech-processing toolkit for recognition, synthesis, translation, enhancement, diarization, spoken-language understanding and related tasks. | iSpeech provides cloud text-to-speech and automated speech-recognition services that turn text into audio or submitted audio into transcriptions. |
Plans
iSpeech
- Plus$2.95 a month
- Premium$3.95 a month
- Pay Per Use$50 a month
- Pay Per Install$0.25 a month
- BasicFree
- HackerFree
- Plus$2.95 a month
- Premium$3.95 a month
- Junior$29 a month
- Pay-per-use 2,000 credits$50, paid once
In their own words
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.
iSpeech
iSpeech provides text-to-speech and automated speech recognition through APIs, SDKs, and online tools. Its speech API can synthesize audio with multiple voices, formats, bitrates, frequencies, and playback speeds, and supports MathML and SSML. The API can also transcribe submitted audio across multiple languages and recognition models; iSpeech says custom models can be created. The homepage lists support for more than 30 languages. Audio downloads are available in AIFF, MP3, OGG, WMA, FLAC, WAV, A-law, μ-law, VOX, and MP4 formats. Listed access includes Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, web, Windows, API, and extension. The Basic plan is free for personal use, and commercial use is listed as available. Plus costs $2.95 a month, billed monthly, and includes 30-minute recordings, approximately 4,167 words. Premium costs $3.95 a month, billed monthly, with 12-hour recordings, approximately 100,000 words. Pay Per Use costs $50 a month for dynamic TTS usage only and includes 2,000 credits. Pay Per Install costs $0.25 a month and has a 10,000-install minimum.