Azure Speech alternative · Speech APIs
An Azure Speech alternative for Hindi TTS and call transcription
₹1 is the T1 voice rate. On T1, Mirai phone calling (₹0.30/min) and call insights (₹0.20/min) are optional; T5 includes both. All prices exclude GST.
Voice Infra sells Mira TTS for Hindi, English and Hinglish at ₹1.80 per 1,000 characters and transcribes recorded calls at ₹18 an hour of audio. Azure Speech lists Hindi neural voices from $15 per million characters, real-time transcription at $1 an hour and batch at $0.18, with a Central India region and a free tier. Choose Azure for many Indian languages, custom voices and an Azure contract; choose us for code-switched Hindi calls, rupee billing and OpenAI's speech protocol.
No sign-up to look around.
Side by side
Azure Speech and Voice Infra
Azure Speech's column comes from Azure Speech's own public pages, each cell linked to the page it was read from. Ours comes from our price list and docs. Pages change, so check the links before you decide.
| Question | Azure Speech | Voice Infra |
|---|---|---|
| Text to speech price | Neural and Neural HD Flash: $15 per 1M characters; Neural HD and MAI-Voice: $22 per 1M characters Source: azure.microsoft.com | ₹1.80 per 1,000 characters, on pay as you go and on Business (₹50,000/month commitment), before GST |
| Speech to text price | Real-time $1 per hour; fast transcription $0.36; batch $0.18; billed per second Source: azure.microsoft.com | Recorded calls: ₹18 per hour of audio (₹0.30 a minute), charged once when the job completes. Streaming recognition is in private preview as a standalone API |
| Hindi | hi-IN neural voices (Swara, Madhur, Aarav, Ananya, Kavya and others) plus MAI-Voice HD voices; hi-IN listed for speech to text, including fast transcription Source: learn.microsoft.com | TTS in Hindi, English and Hinglish. Transcription built for Hindi and Hinglish phone calls |
| API protocol | Azure's Speech SDK and REST APIs, with an endpoint per region Source: learn.microsoft.com | TTS on OpenAI's POST /v1/audio/speech; transcription on POST /v2/transcriptions; one sk_live_ key for both |
| Data location | Central India supports neural TTS and real-time, fast and batch transcription; South India is not supported for standalone speech Source: learn.microsoft.com | Audio, speech recognition, TTS and the model run in India (Mumbai, Noida and Delhi). The control plane (workflow orchestration and the API) runs in Europe, off the audio path |
| Custom voice | Professional voice synthesis $24 per 1M characters, plus training at $52 per compute hour and endpoint hosting Source: azure.microsoft.com | Custom voices on Enterprise plans; contact us |
| Try it free | Free F0 tier: 0.5 million neural characters and 5 audio hours of real-time transcription a month Source: azure.microsoft.com | No sign-up to look around the sandbox; ₹200 of credit once you confirm a work email; clips you play in the console are not charged |
For six platforms in one table, see Voice AI platforms compared.
Which to pick
Which to pick
Choose Azure Speech if…
- You need Indian languages beyond Hindi today. Azure's language page lists neural voices for Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada and Malayalam as well.
- You want streaming speech to text from the same vendor right now. Azure lists hi-IN for real-time, fast and batch transcription, and Central India supports all three.
- You want a custom or professional voice, speaking styles such as cheerful or newscast on a Hindi voice, or avatars.
- Your company already buys Azure, or you want to prototype on the free F0 tier: 0.5 million neural characters and 5 hours of real-time transcription a month.
Choose Voice Infra if…
- Your calls are in Hindi with English mixed in. Our voices code-switch inside a sentence, and our transcripts write Hindi in Devanagari and English in Latin script, the way speakers switched.
- You want speech and transcription priced in rupees on one wallet: ₹1.80 per 1,000 characters for TTS, ₹18 an hour for recorded calls, before GST.
- Your code already calls OpenAI's speech endpoint. Ours takes the same request, so you change the base URL and the model name.
- You need phone audio: raw 8 kHz μ-law or A-law from the TTS API, and speaker-labelled transcripts of recorded calls up to 2 hours long.
In detail
An Azure Speech alternative for Hindi TTS and call transcription: in detail
How do Azure Speech and Voice Infra differ?
Azure Speech is a broad speech service inside Microsoft’s cloud. For Hindi it lists a set of neural voices, some with speaking styles such as cheerful, empathetic or newscast, and newer MAI-Voice HD voices. It transcribes hi-IN in real time, in batch and through fast transcription, and it runs all of that in a Central India region. It also covers Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and other Indian languages that we do not offer yet.
Voice Infra sells the models our own phone agents run on. Mira TTS speaks Hindi, English and the Hinglish in between, through OpenAI’s speech protocol. Mira Transcribe turns recorded calls into speaker-labelled transcripts. Both bill one rupee wallet on one key.
How do the prices line up?
For speech, Azure lists $15 per million characters on neural and Neural HD Flash voices and $22 on Neural HD and MAI-Voice. Mira TTS is ₹1.80 per 1,000 characters, so a million characters is 1,000 × ₹1.80 = ₹1,800, before GST. We charge nothing for a request that fails or stops part-way.
For transcription, Azure lists $1 an hour real-time, $0.36 an hour for fast transcription and $0.18 an hour in batch, billed per second. Our recorded-call transcription is ₹18 per hour of audio, which works out to ₹0.30 a minute, charged to the millisecond once the job completes. Degraded and failed jobs are free. Azure’s free tier gives 5 hours of real-time transcription and half a million neural characters each month, which is enough to prototype on.
How good is our Hindi transcription?
Mira STT, the recognition model inside our agents, scored 9.12% normalised word error rate on all 10,000 utterances of RinggAI’s public Hindi benchmark, the lowest of the five systems scored in our own report. That benchmark did not include Azure, so it says nothing about Azure’s accuracy. It is also read and prompted speech, not phone calls, and the open model we fine-tuned was trained on the training splits of those corpora. Mira Transcribe, the recorded-call product, runs several recognition passes and a language model that writes the final transcript, so the benchmark describes the recogniser, not the whole pipeline. Run both services on your own recordings before you decide.
What does switching take?
For speech, replace the Speech SDK call with an OpenAI-style request: POST /v1/audio/speech with model: "mira-tts", a voice and a response_format. Ask for ulaw_8000 or alaw_8000 when the audio goes to a phone line. For recorded calls, upload the file to POST /v2/transcriptions with a line of context and any names to spell right, then read the job until it completes. The transcription docs show both steps.
If you are comparing Azure because you want to build a calling agent, look at our per-minute plans: ₹1 a minute on T1 with a ₹1,00,000 monthly commitment, ₹3 on T3 with ₹50,000 a month, or ₹5 pay as you go, with recognition, the model and the voice included.
By Mirai Minds · Published
Questions
Which is cheaper for Hindi speech?
Azure lists $15 per million characters for neural voices and $22 for Neural HD. Mira TTS is ₹1.80 per 1,000 characters, which is ₹1,800 per million before GST. The two are in different currencies, so convert at your own rate, and remember Azure's free tier covers the first 0.5 million characters a month.
Can Voice Infra transcribe live calls the way Azure real-time transcription does?
Inside our voice agents, yes: Mira STT runs on every call. As a standalone API, streaming recognition is in private preview, so ask us for access. Recorded calls can be transcribed through the public API today at ₹18 an hour of audio.
Does Mira TTS support SSML?
Our quickstart documents plain text input, up to 2,000 characters per request. If you depend on SSML tags or speaking styles, Azure supports them and we do not document them.
Is Mira TTS ₹1 a minute?
No. ₹1 a minute is the T1 price for a whole phone agent with a ₹1,00,000 monthly commitment, and pay as you go agents are ₹5 a minute. Speech on its own is priced by the character.
Check our column yourself.
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