Fish Audio
Fish Audio is an AI text-to-speech and voice cloning platform that generates 30+ language speech with emotion and non-verbal tags.
Fish Audio is the price-to-expressiveness pick for creator and small-team voice work. Cloning from a 15-second clip, a tag vocabulary that reaches [chuckling] and [crowd laughing], 30+ languages, and Story Studio for audiobooks all sit under a Plus tier at $11/mo billed annually ($15 month-to-month). Against ElevenLabs it wins on invoice size and, per the user quotes on Fish Audio's own homepage, on emotional nuance. It loses where you need a deep native integration catalog or offline generation without an Enterprise contract.
Verified 2d ago · liveness 75/100 · cite: rightaichoice.com/tools/fish-audio
- YouTube and ad creators who need scene-matched narration with tonal control
- Audiobook producers targeting ACX/Audible pacing without a recording booth
- Developers who want a free expressive TTS API to prototype with
- Game and animation studios building character voices across 30+ languages
- Teams that need a broad catalog of native third-party app integrations
- Buyers who want music generation bundled into the same subscription
- Free-tier users who need commercial usage rights on generated audio
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Skip Fish Audio if your pipeline needs a ready-made catalog of native third-party app integrations, or if you want music generation in the same subscription as your voice work.
A minute of generated audio burns roughly 600 to 625 credits, so a long-form audiobook project can exhaust a Plus plan's 250,000 monthly credits well before month end.
Plus at $11/mo billed annually ($15 month-to-month) undercuts most ElevenLabs paid tiers by a wide margin, and Pro at $75/mo billed annually ($100 month-to-month) buys ~1,620 minutes plus 3 seats — competitive with mid-tier plans at larger voice vendors. Max at $749/mo billed annually ($999 month-to-month) is studio-scale and should only be bought against measured monthly minute burn.
In short
Fish Audio — Fish Audio is an AI text-to-speech and voice cloning platform that generates 30+ language speech with emotion and non-verbal tags. Best for YouTube and ad creators who need scene-matched narration with tonal control, Audiobook producers targeting ACX/Audible pacing without a recording booth, Developers who want a free expressive TTS API to prototype with. Free to start; paid plans from $11/mo.
What's new in Fish Audio
Checked 2 days agoAcross the latest 2 updates: 1 launch and 1 news mention.
Fish Audio Drama 3: The Most Emotive Text-to-Speech Model We've Built
Fish Audio released Drama 3, a text-to-speech model the company describes as its most emotive to date, now front and center on the site alongside S2.1 Pro.
How We Made Our Text-to-Speech API Free: The Inference Engineering Behind S2.1 Pro
Fish Audio detailed the inference engineering work that made the S2.1 Pro text-to-speech API free for developers.
What people actually say about Fish Audio — is it worth it?
We ran a structured research pass across product reviews, community discussions, and post-purchase forum threads to surface the patterns vendors won't publish themselves. Below: the recurring strengths, the hidden costs people mention most, and the cohort that consistently regrets adopting this tool.
101 mentions across 5 sources (Hacker News, YouTube, App Store, Bluesky, Lemmy) · researched Jul 25, 2026.
Average across the 5 sources that answered — each source counts once, not each post.
- +Expressive TTS with fine-grained emotion control (angry, sad, excited).
- +Voice cloning from as little as 10-15 seconds of audio.
- +Massive library of 2M+ community voices spanning many styles.
- +Low-latency streaming suitable for real-time applications.
- +Open-source S2 model enables community innovation and local use.
- −Free tier is very restrictive: only a few tries per day.
- −No way to preview cloned voice without paying upfront.
- −Mobile app has bugs, especially downloading audio on iPad.
- −Many useful voices require a Pro subscription.
- −Users want more character-specific voices in the library.
- • Instant voice cloning may require payment even for a single preview
- • Some character voices are locked behind Pro even if community-created
Viability Score
How well maintained and how widely used is Fish Audio? Built from what the vendor actually publishes (docs, changelog, tutorials, integrations, pricing), whether the site is live, and how much real users discuss it. How we calculate this
Last calculated: October 2026
How we score →Key Features
- Text-to-speech on the Drama 3 and S2.1 Pro models
- Voice cloning from roughly 15 seconds of reference audio
- Free S2.1 Pro text-to-speech API for developers
- Voice Design: generate a custom voice from a text prompt
- 8 emotion tags including [angry], [whispering], [soft], [breathy]
- 15 special tags including [laughing], [sobbing], [crowd laughing], [long pause]
- Prompts up to 30,000 characters on paid tiers
- 2,000,000+ community voice library
- Speech-to-text with multi-speaker labels, emotion tags, and natural-language description
- Low-latency streaming voice output for real-time agents
- End-to-end voice agent solution for chatbots and support flows
- 30+ language support including Japanese, French, Arabic, Korean, German
- Story Studio for chapter-level audiobook production
- Avatar Lipsync for images and video, using GPT Image, Seedance, Kling, Veo, and Creatify
- Voice changer, audio separation, audio translation, and sound effects tools
About Fish Audio
Fish Audio turns scripts into speech you can direct, character by character. You paste your text into the editor, drop emotion tags like [angry], [whispering], [breathy], or [excited], add special cues such as [laughing], [sobbing], [sighing], or [long pause], and generate. A single prompt field takes up to 30,000 characters on paid tiers; you pick from a 2,000,000+ community voice library or upload your own reference audio, and voice cloning works from roughly 15 seconds of speech. The model layer moved in October 2026: Drama 3 is now the company's most emotive text-to-speech engine, sitting alongside S2.1 Pro, which still powers the core TTS, cloning, and speech-to-text pipeline. Fish Audio made the S2.1 Pro API free for developers in July 2026 after publishing the inference engineering that made it viable. Speech-to-text returns multi-speaker labels, emotion tags, and natural-language descriptions. Coverage runs to 30+ languages, which is the claim you see validated most often in user quotes referencing Japanese, French, and Arabic output. Beyond raw narration the platform covers Video Voiceovers, Audiobook Narration via Story Studio (ACX/Audible pacing, chapter-level control), Character Voices, Conversational Chatbots with low-latency streaming, and Avatar Lipsync, which pairs generated images and video from models like GPT Image, Seedance, Kling, Veo, and Creatify with any Fish Audio voice. There is also a voice changer, audio separation, audio translation, and sound effects. The audience is creators and small production teams who need expressive multilingual speech without an ElevenLabs-scale invoice, plus developers prototyping on a free TTS API. Enterprise adds on-premise deployment, zero data retention, and SOC2 compliance.
Behind the Verdict
The honest read on Fish Audio is that it sells control, not just output quality. The differentiator you can actually verify on the site is the tag system: eight emotion tags ([angry], [sad], [embarrassed], [emphasis], [whispering], [soft], [breathy], [excited]) and fifteen special tags ([laughing], [chuckling], [moaning], [clear throat], [sobbing], [crying loudly], [sighing], [panting], [groaning], [crowd laughing], [background laughter], [audience laughing], [pause], [long pause]). That is a direction layer most TTS tools reduce to a slider. The catch is that tag effects depend on surrounding text — the vendor's own framing is that expression is shaped by context, so expect a couple of regeneration passes on difficult lines. Model-wise, Drama 3 arrived in October 2026 as the company's most emotive TTS model, and S2.1 Pro remains the workhorse behind TTS, cloning, and speech-to-text. In July 2026 Fish Audio published the inference engineering behind making the S2.1 Pro API free for developers, which is the single best argument for picking it as a prototyping platform: you can wire a paid-grade model into a demo before you commit budget. Enterprise buyers get on-premise deployment, zero data retention, and SOC2 compliance, which is what makes it usable in regulated shops. The practical constraint is credits. A minute of generation burns roughly 600 to 625 credits. Free gets 8,000 credits monthly — about 7 minutes — and caps prompts at 500 characters. Plus gives 250,000 credits (~200 minutes) with 15,000-character prompts, one professional voice slot and 10 private voice slots. Pro jumps to 2,000,000 credits (~1,620 minutes), 3 team seats, and 5 professional voice slots; Max gives 25,000,000 credits (~6,250 minutes), 10 seats, and 15 professional voice slots. Quotas reset each billing cycle and unused minutes do not roll over, so size the tier to your monthly cadence, not your annual total. Where it does not fit: commercial rights are gated. Free output is personal and non-commercial only; paid plans require verified voices you own for commercial use. Anyone wanting music and sound effects in the same subscription should look elsewhere — sound effects exist as a product, but music generation is not what this platform is. And if your workflow depends on a broad catalog of pre-built third-party app integrations, this is not the pick — the product is built around its own editor, API, and voice library rather than a connector marketplace.
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Real-world workflow fit
Concrete scenarios for the personas Fish Audio actually fits — and what changes day-one when you adopt it.
Paste a 10-minute script into the editor, tag each section with [excited] or [whispering] to match the edit, pick a voice from the 2M+ library, and generate.
Outcome: Scene-matched narration in one pass instead of re-recording takes; regenerate only the lines where the tag landed wrong.
Clone a narrator from a 15-second sample, load chapters into Story Studio, and set pacing and emotion per chapter before export.
Outcome: Hours of ACX/Audible-paced audio without a recording booth, with chapter-level rework instead of full re-records.
Wire the free S2.1 Pro API into a chatbot, stream responses with low latency, and inject tone tags for empathetic replies.
Outcome: A voice agent prototype running on a free API before any paid generation tier is needed.
Use Cases
- Turn scripts into scene-matched voiceovers for YouTube, ads, and explainers by swapping emotion tags per section.
- Clone your voice from a 15-second sample and narrate audiobooks with chapter-level control in Story Studio.
- Build character voice sets for games and animation with per-line emotional direction from the special-tag vocabulary.
- Transcribe multilingual audio with speaker labels and emotion tags, then re-synthesize in a different voice.
- Give customer support bots low-latency speech with tone tags for empathetic or upbeat responses.
- Generate an original voice from a text prompt via Voice Design when you have no reference audio to clone.
- Produce lip-synced talking-avatar ads by pairing a generated image or video with any Fish Audio voice.
- Prototype a voice feature on the free S2.1 Pro API before committing to a paid generation tier.
Models Under the Hood
as of 2026-10-15
Limitations
- Free-tier output is personal and non-commercial only; commercial use requires a paid plan plus verified voices you own.
- A minute of generation costs roughly 600 to 625 credits, so Free's 8,000 monthly credits is about 7 minutes with a 500-character prompt cap, Plus's 250,000 credits is about 200 minutes, and unused minutes do not roll over between billing cycles.
- Professional voice slots are tier-gated: 1 on Plus, 5 on Pro, 15 on Max.
- Emotion tags give real control but their effect varies with surrounding text, so expect regeneration passes on difficult lines.
- Cloned voice fidelity tracks your source recording quality.
as of 2026-10-19
Verification history
We have re-verified Fish Audio 19 times since . Each pass re-reads the vendor's own pages and re-checks every listed field against that evidence; passes where nothing had changed are marked as such.
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-checked, vendor evidence unchanged
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
Showing the 6 most recent of 19 verification passes.
Free to cite with attribution — this page re-verifies continuously.
12-month cost
Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.
Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.
Plans compared
For each published Fish Audio tier: who it actually fits, and what it adds vs. the previous tier. Cross-reference the cost calculator above for projected annual outlay.
Free
$0/mo
Ideal for
Anyone evaluating voice quality or making personal, non-commercial clips — no credit card needed.
What this tier adds
Starting tier: 8,000 credits monthly (~7 minutes), 500 characters per generation, 3 public voice slots, no commercial use.
Plus
$11/mo billed annually ($15 month-to-month)
Ideal for
Solo creators publishing monetized videos or short audiobooks who need commercial rights and longer prompts.
What this tier adds
Adds commercial use, 250,000 credits (~200 minutes), 15,000-character prompts, 10 private voice slots, Voice Design, and 1 professional voice slot.
Pro
$75/mo billed annually ($100 month-to-month)
Ideal for
Power users and small businesses running ongoing production across several voices and collaborators.
What this tier adds
Jumps to 2,000,000 credits (~1,620 minutes), 30,000-character prompts, 3 team seats, unlimited voice slots, and 5 professional voice slots, with a 7-day money-back guarantee.
Max
$749/mo billed annually ($999 month-to-month)
Ideal for
Studios and agencies with large-scale production and a roster of distinct professional voices.
What this tier adds
Scales to 25,000,000 credits (~6,250 minutes), 10 team seats, and 15 professional voice slots on top of everything in Pro.
Enterprise
Custom
Ideal for
Organizations with compliance requirements — zero data retention, on-premise deployment, SOC2.
What this tier adds
Custom volume pricing billed annually, plus organization-level controls, zero data retention, on-premise deployment, and SOC2 compliance.
Where the pricing makes sense
The company stage and team size where Fish Audio's pricing actually pencils out — and where peers do it cheaper.
Plus at $11/mo billed annually ($15 month-to-month) undercuts most ElevenLabs paid tiers by a wide margin, and Pro at $75/mo billed annually ($100 month-to-month) buys ~1,620 minutes plus 3 seats — competitive with mid-tier plans at larger voice vendors. Max at $749/mo billed annually ($999 month-to-month) is studio-scale and should only be bought against measured monthly minute burn.
Setup time & first value
How long it actually takes to get something useful out of Fish Audio — broken out by persona, not the marketing-page minute.
Creators: under 10 minutes to a first generated clip — sign up free, pick a library voice, paste tagged text. Voice cloning: add about 5 minutes to record a clean 15-second reference. Developers: the S2.1 Pro API is free to start, so a first request is a same-day job. Teams on Pro or Max need a few minutes more to invite seats and allocate professional voice slots.
Switching to or from Fish Audio
How to bring data in from common predecessors and how to get it back out — written for the switcher, not the buyer.
- →From ElevenLabs: recreate voices by uploading 15-second reference clips, then rebuild scripts using Fish Audio's bracketed tag syntax.
- →From a recorded voiceover workflow: clone the existing narrator from a short clean sample and move scripts into the editor with tags.
- →From a general-purpose TTS API: swap in the free S2.1 Pro API and map your SSML or emotion controls onto bracketed tags.
- ↗To ElevenLabs: export source scripts and re-record reference audio for each voice, since cloned voices don't transfer between platforms.
- ↗To a self-hosted stack: Fish Audio publishes open research models (OpenAudio, Fish Speech, Fish Diffusion) you can evaluate before moving off the hosted service.
Resources & Guides
- Resourcefish.audio
Fish Audio Blog - AI Voice & Text-to-Speech Insights
Explore the latest insights on AI voice generation, text-to-speech, voice cloning, and audio innovation from the Fish Audio team.
- Resourcefish.audio
Fish Audio S2! Fine-Grained AI Voice Control at the Word Level
Fish Audio S2 brings open-domain inline tags, word-level AI voice control, and 80-language support to expressive TTS. See how it works with real examples.
Tutorials & Learning
Official links
Tools that pair well with Fish Audio
Common stack mates teams adopt alongside Fish Audio, with the specific reason each pairing earns its keep.
Inworld AI
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Rask AI
Rask AI dubs videos and audio into 135+ languages with cloned voices, lip-sync and editable transcripts.
OmniVoice Studio
OmniVoice Studio is an open-source desktop studio for local voice cloning, voice design, dubbing, dictation and audiobook production.
Featured Head-to-Head Comparisons
Alternatives to Fish Audio
View allInworld AI
Inworld AI delivers realtime text-to-speech and speech-to-speech voice agents with TTS-2 Flash at 50ms to first audio.
Rask AI
Rask AI dubs videos and audio into 135+ languages with cloned voices, lip-sync and editable transcripts.
OmniVoice Studio
OmniVoice Studio is an open-source desktop studio for local voice cloning, voice design, dubbing, dictation and audiobook production.
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