SpeechifyAI vs Hume Octave

Hume's Octave leads on emotionally expressive, empathic speech, sold through subscription tiers that work out to roughly $50-150 per 1M. SpeechifyAI offers its own emotion control and expressive neural voices from $6 per 1M characters, well below Hume's effective rates.

Get API Key — Free See pricing

Speechify

Hume Octave

SpeechifyAI at a glance

from $6

per 1M characters

<300ms

first byte, streaming

30+

languages

1,500+

voices

SpeechifyAI vs Hume Octave, capability by capability
Capability	Speechify	Hume Octave
Price (per 1M chars)	From $6 / 1M	Roughly $50-150 depending on subscription tier
Pricing model	Per character; no credits, no token math	Subscription tiers; effective per-character rate varies
Expressiveness / emotion	Emotion control plus SSML	Industry-leading emotional expressiveness; a core strength
Voices	1,500+	Generated and curated voices; fewer fixed presets
Languages	30+	Multilingual; fewer languages
Voice cloning	Professional voice cloning included	Voice design and customization focus
Latency	Sub-300ms first byte, streaming	Streaming; latency varies
Commercial use / free tier	Commercial use on every plan; 50K chars/month free	Commercial use; tiered subscriptions

SpeechifyAI vs Hume Octave, in plain English

Emotion plus a rate that works at any scale

Hume Octave sells in subscription tiers from $3 a month to $500 a month, with the effective rate landing around $50 to $150 per million characters depending on the tier; for a small project the subscription floor is the bill, and for a big project the high tier is the bill. SpeechifyAI is from $6 per million characters across every plan, with no subscription floor on the lowest paid tiers, so the bill scales with the work rather than with the plan size picked at signup.

Emotion in production, not just in the demo

Hume's emotion model is genuinely distinctive: 48 emotions and 600 voice descriptors, trained for empathic delivery. SpeechifyAI ships emotion control plus SSML so the voice can land warmth, urgency, or calm where the script needs it, alongside professional voice cloning, a 99.9% uptime SLA, and a 1,500+ voice catalog covering use cases beyond the empathic-delivery sweet spot.

The verdict

SpeechifyAI is from $6 per million characters across every plan with no subscription floor, professional voice cloning included on Starter and above, a 1,500+ voice catalog covering 30+ languages, and a 99.9% uptime SLA in the contract.

Get API Key — Free All comparisons

More comparisons

vs ElevenLabs vs Google Cloud Text-to-Speech vs Microsoft Azure Text to Speech vs Amazon Polly vs Deepgram Aura vs Cartesia Sonic vs PlayHT vs OpenAI Text-to-Speech vs Rime