Quick TTS vs TTSReader: Which Free Text-to-Speech Should You Use?

Published September 8, 2026

TTSReader started where Quick TTS still is: free browser voices, paste and press play. Then it added a paid cloud layer on top. That one decision is the whole comparison, and it cuts in both directions.

The short answer

Pick TTSReader if you want commercial-grade cloud voices, a pronunciation dictionary, or scripted multi-voice dialogue, and you accept sending your text to a server and paying past 5,000 premium characters. Pick Quick TTS if you want unlimited neural speech that never leaves your browser.

• TTSReader free. All Web Speech voices unlimited, plus a 5,000-character taste of the premium cloud voices, with no commercial use.
• TTSReader Premium. $10.99 a month or $99 a year for 1M premium characters a month, generated on their servers.
• Quick TTS. Free, ad-supported, no account, no character cap, four engines including three neural ones that run on your own hardware.

Where TTSReader genuinely wins

Give them credit properly. TTSReader is the closest product to ours in spirit, and it has shipped several things we have not.

• A commercial cloud voice catalogue. Their homepage offers "the best voices in the world from Google, OpenAI, xAI (Grok), Microsoft & propietary AI voices". Those are the voices behind polished video narration. Ours are open models running on your GPU, and on some lines you can hear the difference.
• A pronunciation dictionary. It "lets users define custom word-to-pronunciation mappings", and "the dictionary persists across sessions". If your text is full of surnames, drug names, or a product nobody says right, that feature alone decides it.
• Scripted multi-voice dialogue. You put an inline code such as {{set: lang=en; name=Nova Premium; rate=1.2;}} before a line to "switch the active voice to the desired character". One script, several speakers, several languages. We read a document in one voice.
• Reach outside the tab. They have a Chrome extension, currently "slowly adding users to its preview version", an embeddable player for site owners whose "general version of the plugin is completely free", and native mobile apps they are still expanding: "A whole new TTSReader iOS APP is now available" shipped in August 2026, and "Android will soon follow".
• A developer API. They sell a "single endpoint to ALL the best AI Speech Engines: OpenAI, Azure, Google, ElevenLabs, and more", at "3 Miliion characters from TTSReader, for just $39". If you are automating narration in a pipeline, we are not a candidate at all.

Things Quick TTS can't do that TTSReader can

The same list without the softening, because it is the honest part of this page.

• No pronunciation dictionary. You cannot teach our engines a word.
• No per-line voice or language switching inside one document.
• No browser extension, so we cannot read the page you are already on.
• No API, no embeddable player, no native mobile apps.
• No cloud premium voices, and no plan to add any.

Where Quick TTS wins

The other side of the ledger is narrower and, for a lot of people, decisive.

• The neural voices are free and uncapped. TTSReader's good voices are metered cloud calls. Ours are three on-device engines: Piper in 13 languages on almost any browser with WebAssembly, Kokoro with 28 English voices on any WebGPU browser except iOS, and Supertonic HD at 44.1kHz across 31 languages, WebGPU and a fast enough GPU. There is no character counter anywhere in the product.
• Nothing is uploaded. Every engine synthesises inside your browser. For contracts, medical notes, unpublished drafts, or anything under NDA, that is not a preference, it is the requirement. The FAQ answers this one directly.
• OCR on scanned pages. TTSReader's own FAQ says it "supports the uploading of textual PDF files", meaning a PDF that already carries a text layer. We import PDF, DOC, DOCX, EPUB, ODT, RTF, HTML, TXT and Markdown, and we run OCR in the browser on scanned PDFs and photographed pages.
• 32 translated interfaces. The whole site ships in 32 locales. TTSReader localises too: its footer switcher offers 15 versions, including German, Japanese and Arabic. We cover roughly twice as many.
• Real file output. Download WAV or MP3, and for long documents a multi-part ZIP, so a novel does not have to fit in one file.
• No account for anything. No email, no credits, no free-tier ledger to watch. Open the page, paste, press play.

Are TTSReader's premium voices free?

No. The free tier gives you unlimited system voices plus a small sample of the premium ones, and everything past that sample is paid.

• The free tier lists premium voices as "5k total", with commercial use and publishing the generated audio both marked as not allowed.
• The system voices are the exception on volume: "ALL WebSpeech-API voices are given for 100% FREE, without any usage limits." The free plan's own terms still say "No bots, automations, API or any commercial use", so unmetered is not the same as unrestricted.
• Past 5,000 characters you either subscribe or buy credits, priced on their pricing page from "200k chars: $10" up to "10M chars: $300".

Pricing, honestly

Quick TTS is free and stays free. Display ads cover the hosting, the models are open-source, and they run on your machine, so one more reader costs us nothing. There is no premium tier to sell you.

TTSReader charges $10.99 a month, or $99 a year, for 1M premium characters. That is fair pricing for what it is. Somebody pays Google and Azure for every character synthesised, and a metered plan is the only honest way to resell that. The trade is stated rather than hidden: their best voices cost money because those voices cost them money. Ours are free because your own GPU does the work.

Which one should you pick?

• Narrating a commercial video or podcast. TTSReader Premium. Their free tier forbids commercial use, and their paid voices suit published work better than anything running in a browser tab.
• Text full of names our engines will mangle. TTSReader. The pronunciation dictionary has no equivalent here.
• A script with several characters. TTSReader. Per-line voice switching is a real feature and we do not have it.
• Confidential documents. Quick TTS. Nothing is transmitted, on any tier, by any engine.
• A 400-page book you want read end to end. Quick TTS. No character cap, and long documents download as a multi-part ZIP.
• Scanned PDFs and photographed pages. Quick TTS, for the in-browser OCR.
• Reading in a language other than English. Check both. We cover 31 languages on Supertonic and 13 on Piper, with the interface translated into 32 locales. Their cloud catalogue is larger, and metered.
• Building software. TTSReader has an API. We do not have one.

NaturalReader, Speechify and TTSMaker turn up in the same searches. The comparison page puts all of them side by side, and the Quick TTS vs NaturalReader post covers the other big single-target comparison. Read that one if OCR, mobile apps and highlight-sync reading are what you are shopping for.

Try Quick TTS

Open Quick TTS, paste your text, and press play. Pick Supertonic HD or Kokoro if you are on desktop Chrome or Edge, Piper otherwise. If it turns out you need a pronunciation dictionary, multi-voice scripting, or an API, go use TTSReader and pay them, because they built those things and we did not. For everything else this is free, uncapped, and never leaves your browser. The about page explains why it is built that way.