OpenAI TTS-1
Available openai/tts-1 · by OpenAI · neural-tts
Pricing — 1 offering(s)
OpenAI (Audio)
Text characters
- $15.00 / 1M characters Current 2023-11-06 → present
Showing the active price and any recorded history. Full pricing history is available via the paid API — see API docs.
Capability profile
voice naturalness moderate
language support strong
voice variety weak
streaming latency strong
cloning support weak
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Score | Config | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| MOS (naturalness) | — | No independently published MOS. Vendor positions as latency-optimised; community rates quality as moderate. | — |
| First-byte latency | — | Vendor-described as low latency. Specific ms values not publicly disclosed by OpenAI. | — |
Operator guidance
Choose TTS-1 when cost and speed are the priority. At $15/1M chars it is the cheapest major TTS API. Upgrade to TTS-1 HD for quality-critical use (voice- overs, narration). Use ElevenLabs for natural voice quality or voice cloning.
Use cases
- App TTS at scale where cost matters more than premium voice quality
- Assistants and chatbots needing fast speech output
- Multi-language content narration
Limitations
- Only 6 preset voices — no voice cloning or custom voice creation
- No SSML support; limited prosody control
- Audio quality noticeably below ElevenLabs Multilingual v2 on close listening