Free tool · Text to speech
Free text to speech, in a voice worth hearing.
Paste your text, pick a voice and generate. Your free credits read 1,000 words in hundreds of natural voices and dozens of languages, and you download the MP3.
- Free: 1,000 words, about 7 minutes of speech
- No card, no time limit
- A free account is all it takes: no card, and the tool opens with this already in place.
01How it works
Three steps, start to finish.
- Step 1
Paste your text
Up to 2,000 characters here; in the app, as long as you like, split into lines.
- Step 2
Pick a voice
Play the samples and choose. Hundreds more are in the library, in dozens of languages.
- Step 3
Generate and download
Make a free account and press Generate. Your text and voice are already there.
02Made for
Where people use it.
- YouTube & videoVoiceovers paced to your cut“Three years ago, this valley was underwater.”A 10-minute voiceover ≈ 1,500 credits
- E-learning & trainingLessons people finish“In this lesson, we'll look at how compound interest works.”A 10-module course ≈ 7,500 credits
- Articles & accessibilityA listen button on every post“Why cities are getting quieter. By Ana Ruiz.”A 1,200-word article ≈ 1,200 credits
- Ads & marketingEvery version of the spot, today“Your mornings just got faster.”Ten versions of a 30-second ad ≈ 750 credits
03Details
What the free plan covers.
- Free to start
- 1,000 words in a standard voice, given once when you sign up.
- Voices
- Hundreds of natural voices in dozens of languages and accents, the same ones paid plans use.
- Direction
- Pace, emotion and emphasis line by line, and how a name should be said.
- Download
- MP3 or WAV, loudness set for podcasts, video or audiobooks.
- Kept for
- Exports stay until you delete them. Line audio you haven't exported is kept 7 days on the free plan.
04Questions
Before you start.
Free text to speech used to mean a robotic voice. It doesn't any more: the voices on Leelo's free plan are the same ones paid plans use. Here's how to get the most natural result from them, and what the free plan does and doesn't cover.
What you get for free
A free Leelo account starts with 1,000 credits, given once, and a word read in a standard voice costs one credit. That's about 1,000 words, roughly seven minutes of speech at a normal reading pace, in any of the hundreds of voices in the voice library, with MP3 or WAV downloads.
Files made on the free plan are kept for 7 days, and the audio is for personal projects and trying Leelo out. For commercial use (ads, monetised videos, courses you sell) any paid plan covers it.
Write text that sounds good read aloud
Text written for a page often sounds stiff spoken. Short sentences, one idea each, and the important word at the end of the sentence all help a voice sound natural.
- Spell out what should be said: “twenty twenty-six”, “three point five per cent”.
- Use commas and full stops for breathing room; a voice pauses where you punctuate.
- Read it once yourself. Anything you trip over, the voice will too.
Pick the voice for the job
A warm, slower voice suits explainers and audiobooks; a brighter, quicker one suits ads and social clips. Play a few samples with your own first sentence in mind. For a language other than English, choose a voice whose first language it is: the language pages list them by accent.
When the text is longer than a paragraph
The box on this page takes 2,000 characters. In the app a project can be as long as you need, split into lines you can direct one at a time: pace, emotion and emphasis per line, and a fixed pronunciation for names. That's the Studio, and it's on the free plan too.
To check how long a script runs before you voice it, paste it into the script length calculator.
Try it on your own work.
1,000 free credits to try everything. No card needed, and nothing to install.
Start free: 1,000 credits