Changelog & Blog
Text-to-speech rankings, month by month
What changed on the board, and why. Monthly rankings from the aggregate score, methodology notes, and the movement behind each shift.
Sonic 3.6 (Cartesia) Review: Real-Time Conversational Leader, Long-Form Lagger
Cartesia's Sonic 3.6 tops both independent Elo boards that measure it and is genuinely fast, but independent benchmarks undercut its sub-90ms latency marketing and its long-form output trails the field.
Simba 3.2 (Speechify) Review: Aggregate #1, Not a Unanimous Verdict
Where Simba 3.2 actually lands across Artificial Analysis, Voice Arena, and the Vapi Humanness Index — and why the texttospeech.com #1 is a methodology output, not a consensus.
Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS review: cheap and expressive, but broken past a minute
Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS lands mid-table on Artificial Analysis and delivers strong short-form output at a low price, but a confirmed long-form voice-drift defect and no voice cloning cap its usefulness.
ElevenLabs Eleven v3 review: the most expressive voice in TTS — and the slowest flagship
Eleven v3 still tops Vapi's Humanness Index at 97/100 and leads on expressiveness, but 758ms latency and a year of Elo decay have made it a pre-rendered niche pick in 2026.
First look: the new TTS models that landed in August 2026
Six new TTS models hit the leaderboard in August 2026. Only Cartesia's Sonic 3.6 topped both boards. Here's every arrival, its Elo, and its price.
Best TTS providers and models (August 2026)
The inaugural TTS meta-leaderboard snapshot. Here's where the board stands as of August 2026.
How the meta-leaderboard works: our methodology
Bayesian pairwise rank aggregation explained. How we combine three public TTS leaderboards into one trustworthy ranking using fractional scaling, coverage smoothing, Borda counts, and Schulze tiebreaks.
The aggregated TTS leaderboard is live
We aggregate three public TTS leaderboards into one score. Bayesian rank aggregation, weekly refreshes, and weekly movers & shakers posts for builders picking a TTS model.