A Google Cloud Text-to-Speech alternative for Hindi voices

How do Google Cloud Text-to-Speech and Mira TTS differ?

Google sells speech synthesis as part of Google Cloud, with several generations of voices on one price list. For Hindi, the voice list shows 30 Chirp 3: HD voices plus older Neural2, WaveNet and Standard voices, and Google’s newer Gemini-TTS models take a text prompt that shapes how a line is read. If you need a wide choice of Hindi voices, or you already run your stack on Google Cloud, it is a sensible default.

Mira TTS is narrower. It is the voice our own phone agents use, offered as a standalone API, and we built it for the Hindi people speak on calls, which moves into English and back inside one sentence. You call it through OpenAI’s speech protocol, pay in rupees, and can ask for audio already in the format a phone line uses.

What does a month of Hindi speech cost?

Google bills by character, counting spaces, newlines and SSML tags. Chirp 3: HD voices are US$30 per million characters after the first million each month, which are free. Neural2 is US$16, and WaveNet and Standard are US$4 per million with 4 million free. Mira TTS is ₹1.80 per 1,000 characters on pay as you go and on the Business plan, so 10 lakh characters is 1,000 × ₹1.80 = ₹1,800 before GST. We do not charge for a request that fails or stops part-way, and every response reports the characters billed in a header.

At a few lakh characters a month, Google’s free tier will cost you less. At steady volume the comparison is between Google’s per-million rate in dollars and ours in rupees, and we leave the currency conversion to you.

What does switching from Google take?

The request shape changes. Google’s client takes a voice name, an audio config and the input; ours is OpenAI’s POST /v1/audio/speech with model: "mira-tts", a voice, a response_format and the text. Ask for pcm to stream raw 48 kHz audio, ulaw_8000 for Twilio or Plivo streams, or wav for a file. If your agent already streams LLM output into Google’s bidirectional synthesis, our WebSocket endpoint does the same job: send text as the model writes it, and get audio back sentence by sentence.

Where does the audio get made?

Google’s regional endpoints page offers global, US and EU endpoints. Its Asia Pacific table marks Chirp 3: HD for Tokyo and Singapore and lists Mumbai with no model marked. Our docs say audio, speech recognition, TTS and the model run in India, while the control plane, meaning workflow orchestration and the API, runs in Europe and stays off the audio path. If your compliance team needs a specific answer, ask both companies in writing.

How should you decide?

Pick the twenty or thirty lines your product says most often, with names, amounts and the English words your callers use. Render them with two or three Google hi-IN voices and with ours, and ask native speakers to choose without knowing which is which. Play the winners over a real phone call too. The Hindi TTS comparison puts Google’s prices next to the other Hindi voices on the market, each linked to its source.

If what you are building is a calling agent, compare per-minute plans instead: ours run from ₹1 a minute on T1 (₹1,00,000 monthly commitment) to ₹5 a minute pay as you go, with the voice, speech recognition and the model included.