Fish Audio is the most expressive and emotionally rich text-to-speech model. It generates lifelike voices that capture emotion, rhythm, and nuance with remarkable realism. Fish Audio Voice Clone recreates a natural voice from just 10 seconds of audio—preserving accent, tone, and speaking habits. Proudly built by the open-source team behind So-VITS-SVC and Bert-VITS2, giving a soul to every voice.
Realtime speech-to-text for voice agents, $0.36 an hour
Fish Audio Realtime Speech to Text (transcribe-stream-1, in preview) streams audio over a WebSocket and returns transcripts turn by turn. It detects when the user has finished, tells speech from background noise, and recognizes backchannels like “mm-hm”. Per the docs, first draft text arrives about 0.5 seconds after speech starts. Supports 29 language codes, custom vocabulary, speaker tags and 8 to 48 kHz PCM audio. $0.36 per hour.
Reviewers see Fish Audio as a strong TTS and voice-cloning tool with consistently praised voice quality, fast generation, and a solid range of voices. Several users say cloning works well and that long scripts come out cleanly without much tweaking, while some also find it cost-effective. Feedback is not entirely uniform: a few users wanted more free trial credit, and one noted unclear demo limitations when tags appeared available but did not work. Makers of SUN and InsForge also stress reliability, speed, and stable performance at scale.
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fast performance (5)
cost-effective (4)
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Fish Audio Realtime Speech to Text is a live transcription API for voice agents, running on transcribe-stream-1. The docs say it’s in preview.
You stream audio over a WebSocket and get transcripts back turn by turn. Besides the text, it works out when the user has actually finished talking, which is the hard part of building a voice agent that doesn’t cut people off or wait too long.
Here’s what that covers:
live draft text while the person is still speaking, then one final transcript per turn
an “eager end of turn” signal, so your agent can start its LLM call early
backchannel detection, so an “mm-hm” while the agent talks isn’t treated as an interruption
background awareness, so a TV or side conversation usually comes back marked as not the user’s turn
custom vocabulary (up to 100 terms), prior conversation context, and speaker tags
29 language codes, and 16-bit PCM audio from 8 to 48 kHz (phone audio needs decoding to PCM first)
On speed, the docs say the first draft arrives about 0.5 seconds after speech starts, and the final transcript about 1.1 seconds after the speaker stops. Those were measured on production with synthetic speech, and network and audio sending add to them.
Pricing is $0.36 per hour, billed per second of session time. Sessions can run up to 60 minutes.
Good fit if you’re building a voice agent, live captions or phone-call transcription and want turn detection included instead of building it yourself. It’s developer-only, with no SDK for this endpoint, but the cookbook has tested Python and Node.js clients.
I've used Fish Audio for their text to speech feature, and i find that most of the audio features found in the library are pretty good. You can find multiple types of voices for the task you wish to accomplish with it, or just use it for fun or more personal projects.
What needs improvement
inconsistent audio quality (1)
vs Alternatives
I personally chose Fish Audio since they let you produce a decent amount of texts before having to invest in it. I find the possibility to test out a numerous amount of times something that other competitors don't usually do.
That is why I believe they also thought about first time users of their products, as well as you can gain the points needed for the product through community engagement.
Giving Fish a try vs. other speech apps (11Labs, HeyGen, etc.). Should the tags work on the demo version? Read your doc, but they do not seem to work when I generate a file. The cloning was quite good, even in the demo version, which has some limitations.
What needs improvement
If a feature doesn't work in the demo/trial, please let people know. I don't know if the feature is broken or just not available. Some features are not available (grayed out), but the tags are available, but not working.
fast performance (5)cost-effective (4)massive voice data (1)ultra-low latency (1)
We evaluated a lot of TTS providers before making Fish Audio the default in InsForge’s model gateway. It came down to quality, speed, and reliability — and Fish Audio checked all three. Now we’re running it across 15,000+ developers and over 1B tokens/month, and it’s been rock solid. The thing that stands out most is the model quality — you can tell there’s real research depth behind it. And the team ships fast and stays close to partners, which matters a lot when we’re scaling.
Fish Audio Realtime Speech to Text is a live transcription API for voice agents, running on transcribe-stream-1. The docs say it’s in preview.
You stream audio over a WebSocket and get transcripts back turn by turn. Besides the text, it works out when the user has actually finished talking, which is the hard part of building a voice agent that doesn’t cut people off or wait too long.
Here’s what that covers:
live draft text while the person is still speaking, then one final transcript per turn
an “eager end of turn” signal, so your agent can start its LLM call early
backchannel detection, so an “mm-hm” while the agent talks isn’t treated as an interruption
background awareness, so a TV or side conversation usually comes back marked as not the user’s turn
custom vocabulary (up to 100 terms), prior conversation context, and speaker tags
29 language codes, and 16-bit PCM audio from 8 to 48 kHz (phone audio needs decoding to PCM first)
On speed, the docs say the first draft arrives about 0.5 seconds after speech starts, and the final transcript about 1.1 seconds after the speaker stops. Those were measured on production with synthetic speech, and network and audio sending add to them.
Pricing is $0.36 per hour, billed per second of session time. Sessions can run up to 60 minutes.
Good fit if you’re building a voice agent, live captions or phone-call transcription and want turn detection included instead of building it yourself. It’s developer-only, with no SDK for this endpoint, but the cookbook has tested Python and Node.js clients.
Realtime Speech to Text docs