Reviewed by
Deepak Kumar
About Fish Audio
Fish Audio holds a 4.5/5 editor rating, starts at Free.
Fish Audio is an AI voice platform for text-to-speech, voice cloning, speech-to-text, and audio translation, with fine-grained emotion and effect control and a library of over 2 million community voices. It clones a voice from about 15 seconds of audio, supports 30+ languages, offers a real-time API, and is priced well below incumbents like ElevenLabs. A free tier covers light personal use; paid plans start at $15/mo.
Best for: Creators, indie developers, and localization/dubbing teams who want expressive, emotion-controllable TTS and fast voice cloning with an API that costs a fraction of ElevenLabs.
“A fast-growing, well-funded voice-AI platform that pairs expressive, tag-controllable TTS with fast voice cloning and API pricing that materially undercuts ElevenLabs. Best for creators, developers, and localization teams; the usual cloning-consent responsibilities apply.”
What is Fish Audio?
Fish Audio, built by Palo Alto-based Hanabi AI Inc., is one of the fastest-growing names in voice AI, reaching more than 8 million users and $21M in ARR within roughly a year of launch and raising a $52M seed round in July 2026. The product centers on an expressive text-to-speech model with fine-grained control: writers can insert emotion tags (angry, sad, excited, whispering) and effect tags (laughing, crying, sighing) directly into the text to shape delivery, which is where Fish Audio differentiates from flatter TTS engines.
The platform is broader than TTS alone. It bundles voice cloning that works from roughly 15 seconds of reference audio, speech-to-text transcription, a voice changer, and audio translation, alongside a community library of over 2 million voices. A Story Studio mode targets long-form audiobook and narration work. For developers, Fish Audio exposes a REST API with SDKs and pay-as-you-go pricing, and its published API rate (S2 model) is frequently cited as roughly an order of magnitude cheaper than ElevenLabs, which has made it a popular drop-in for cost-sensitive teams.
Language coverage spans English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Spanish, Arabic and 30+ languages in total, with real-time streaming for interactive use cases. The pricing ladder runs from a free tier (8,000 monthly credits, commercial use permitted) up through Plus and Pro plans to a Max plan and custom Enterprise terms that add zero-data-retention, on-premise deployment, and SOC 2 compliance.
The honest caveats are the ones that come with any high-fidelity cloning tool: consent and misuse risk sit with the user, output quality varies by language and by the quality of the reference sample, and the credit-based metering means heavy production use is billed by volume rather than a flat seat. For creators, developers, and localization teams who want expressive output and API economics that undercut the incumbents, Fish Audio is a strong contender in 2026.
Key Features of Fish Audio
Text to Speech
3Inline tags (angry, sad, excited, whispering, laughing, crying, sighing) shape delivery directly in the text.
Low-latency streaming output for interactive and conversational use.
English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Spanish, Arabic and more.
Voice Cloning
2Clone a voice from roughly 15 seconds of reference audio.
Over two million shared voices to browse and use.
Audio Tools
4Transcription of audio to text.
Transform a recorded voice into another.
Translate spoken audio across languages.
Long-form audiobook and narration workflow.
Developer
1REST API with SDKs and pay-as-you-go pricing for TTS, STT, and cloning.
Use Cases
- Audiobook and podcast narration
- Video voiceover and dubbing
- Localization and translation
- Conversational agents and IVR
- Accessibility / read-aloud
Limitations
Output quality varies by language and reference-sample quality; credit-based metering means heavy production use is billed by volume; voice-cloning consent and misuse responsibility rests with the user.