iSpeech

iSpeech is a long-running cloud speech platform offering both Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) through a unified HTTP API. The service ships 40+ voices across English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Russian and Scandinavian languages, with tunable speed/pitch/bitrate, SSML and MathML markup, word-timing position markers, and viseme data for lip-sync animation. ASR supports both freeform dictation and constrained command-grammar recognition.

It is squarely aimed at developers embedding voice into apps rather than end users. SDKs cover the usual mobile targets (iOS, Android, BlackBerry) plus server/desktop bindings for .NET, Java, PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, Python and Perl. Mobile SDKs are free for non-revenue apps that follow iSpeech's branding rules; otherwise pricing is metered between roughly $0.0001 and $0.05 per word (TTS) or transaction (ASR), with volume discounts. There is no modern self-serve dashboard pricing page in the style of newer rivals, and the site itself feels dated.

iSpeech predates the current neural-TTS wave and its voice quality is closer to classic concatenative/parametric systems than to ElevenLabs or Azure Neural voices. It is a reasonable pick if you need a stable, multi-platform API with command-grammar ASR and don't require state-of-the-art naturalness, but anyone shopping primarily on voice realism should benchmark it against newer providers first.