A text-to-speech platform built around low-latency streaming voice — its Simba models turn any script into natural narration for reading, voiceover, and developer apps.
Last verified · 2026-07-06 · by Moe Ameen
Speechify is a text-to-speech company that turns written text into natural-sounding narration. Cliff Weitzman, who is dyslexic, started building it as a college reading aid and co-founded the company with Tyler Weitzman in 2017. It began as a consumer reading app — highlight an article, PDF, or ebook and have it read aloud — and has grown into a platform with tens of millions of users and several products around one core: high-quality synthetic voice.
Today Speechify spans four things. The consumer Reader app (on web, iOS, Android, and as a Chrome extension) reads documents and web pages aloud, with a large voice library and support for many languages. Speechify Studio is the creator-facing side — a voiceover and dubbing workspace for videos, ads, and other projects, billed on credits. Speechify Audiobooks sells narrated books. And the Speechify Voice API is the developer product: a REST endpoint plus first-party TypeScript and Python SDKs that let apps generate speech programmatically.
The engine underneath is Speechify's Simba voice-model family, developed by its in-house voice AI research lab. Simba 3.0 is a streaming-native model designed for very low latency — audio starts playing in chunks as it is generated rather than after the whole clip renders — with expressive emotion controls and zero-shot voice cloning from a short audio sample. An earlier multilingual model, Simba 1.6, covers 30-plus languages with a large voice roster. The pitch across the family is quality plus streaming speed for real-time uses like voice agents, narration, and accessibility.
Speechify has leaned hard into third-party benchmark results. Its Simba 3.2 model was announced as ranking second on Voice Arena's text-to-speech quality leaderboard — a blind, Elo-rated evaluation where native speakers compare unlabeled samples — with the company noting the only model ahead of it is not real-time capable and the model tied with it costs several times more per character. Earlier, Simba 3.0 placed in the top 10 of the Artificial Analysis TTS leaderboard while pricing below the models ranked above it. API pricing starts around $6 per million characters; verify current rates and consumer plan prices on Speechify's own pages, since they change. The honest framing: Speechify is a voice and narration engine, not a content-publishing tool — it makes audio, it does not caption video, build carousels, write a brand voice across a week, or post anything to your channels.
Speechify and Kompozy sit on opposite sides of the same content — the voice and the everything-else. Speechify's job is turning words into a great-sounding audio track: a narrated blog, a podcast-style read, a video voiceover, a low-latency stream inside an app. That is a genuinely hard, well-executed thing, and Kompozy does not try to out-narrate it — for social talking-head video Kompozy already generates avatar clips with HeyGen's own native TTS, so the two rarely fight over the same lane. Where they pair is the source material. Kompozy is the engine that writes and ships the words in the first place: it generates Blog Articles, Text Posts, Email Newsletters, and scripts governed by a Persona Brief and banned-word filters, so the copy you hand Speechify to voice is already on-brand and audience-fit rather than something you drafted by hand.
The concrete workflow runs one source two ways. Say you record or draft a piece of expertise. Kompozy turns it into a full week of published content — Clipped and Persona Shorts for feeds, brand-exact Carousel Posts, Quote Graphics and Photo Posts, a Blog Article, and a Newsletter — then schedules and publishes the set across nine social platforms plus blog and email from one queue with Autopilot. Speechify takes the written outputs from that same source and voices the audio channel: narrate the blog for a listen-along version, generate the voiceover for a faceless YouTube cut, or stream the read inside your app for accessibility. Kompozy owns generation and distribution across formats and platforms; Speechify owns the spoken-audio layer. Run both and one idea covers text, image, video, and voice.
Speechify is an AI text-to-speech platform that turns written text into natural-sounding narration. It spans a consumer Reader app, Speechify Studio for creator voiceover, an audiobooks product, and a developer Voice API, all built on its Simba voice models. It was founded in 2017 by Cliff Weitzman, who built it originally as a dyslexia reading aid.
Simba is Speechify's in-house voice-model family. Simba 3.0 is a streaming-native model built for very low latency with expressive emotion controls and zero-shot voice cloning; Simba 1.6 covers 30-plus languages. Speechify announced that its Simba 3.2 model ranked second on Voice Arena's blind text-to-speech quality leaderboard.
Speechify has stated its voice API pricing starts around $6 per million characters, which it positions as far cheaper than several higher-priced competitors. Consumer plans (a free tier plus a paid Premium) and Speechify Studio credits are priced separately. Rates change, so confirm current numbers on Speechify's own pricing pages.
No. Speechify generates audio — narration, voiceover, streaming speech — but it does not caption video, build carousels or blogs, keep a brand voice across a content week, or schedule and post to your channels. A content engine like Kompozy handles the writing, format fan-out, and cross-platform publishing.
Use Kompozy to generate and publish the content — blog, posts, newsletter, short-form video, carousels — across nine platforms, then use Speechify to voice the written outputs into audio: a listen-along blog, a video voiceover, or an in-app read. Kompozy owns generation and distribution; Speechify owns the spoken-audio layer.