Answers
Short answers to the questions people actually ask about AI voice.
- Is AI voice legal for commercial use? Yes, provided the service licenses it and you are not imitating a real person. On Naadly, audio rendered on any plan - including free - may be used commercially; the open voice models behind it carry their own licences, mostly CC BY 4.0, and a few require a credit line, printed on each voice's page. Cloning an identifiable person additionally requires their documented consent.
- How much audio do you need to clone a voice? About 30 seconds of clean, single-speaker speech. Recording quality matters far more than length: a quiet room, a consistent distance from the microphone and normal delivery beat ten minutes of noisy audio. Naadly also requires a spoken consent statement from the speaker before it will create the clone.
- Is there a genuinely free AI voice generator? Yes, with limits that are stated rather than hidden. Naadly gives 30 minutes of audio a month without a card, and the audio may be used commercially. Free tools that advertise unlimited generation usually pay for it with an audible watermark, with rights to your input, or by closing.
- Does AI voice sound human yet? For narration, usually - listeners do not notice a good synthetic narrator reading well-written copy. For performance it does not: sarcasm, grief, comic timing and two-person dialogue remain audibly synthetic, and the giveaway is rhythm rather than timbre. The reliable workaround is to act the line yourself and convert it to the voice you want.
- How do you make an AI voice sound natural? Fix the script before the settings: one idea per sentence, punctuation where a breath goes, numbers written the way they should be heard, and names in the pronunciation dictionary. Then choose a voice whose accent and pace match the material, slow it slightly, and re-render individual lines rather than accepting the first pass.
- What does an hour of AI voice-over cost? It depends whether you are billed for characters or minutes. Naadly meters minutes: $15 a month buys 6,000 minutes, and standard-language speech is uncapped on $39. Per-character services work out at roughly 55,000-60,000 characters per finished hour, which is the conversion to do before comparing anything.
- Can you monetise YouTube videos with an AI voice? Yes. The policies that get channels demonetised target mass-produced, repetitive, low-value content, not synthetic narration as such - a well-made video with an AI narrator is monetisable. Platforms do provide disclosure fields for realistic synthetic media and expect them to be used; check the current policy where you publish.
- What is the best AI voice for an audiobook? A deliberate, clearly-graded voice in your reader's accent, chosen by auditioning it on your hardest page rather than on a demo line - dialogue and a name-heavy paragraph. Whatever you pick, keep it for the entire book and the entire series: consistency matters more than the marginal naturalness of a second voice.
- Which Indian languages can AI text to speech read? Naadly reads 23: Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Indian English, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. The engine infers the language from the script you paste, so Devanagari Hindi with English brand names inside it reads correctly.
- Do AI voice services train on the text and audio you upload? Some do; Naadly does not. Scripts, uploads and reference recordings are used to do the job you asked for and nothing else, and no model here is trained on customer input. You can export the whole workspace as JSON or delete it - audio in storage included - from Settings, without emailing anybody.
- Are AI-generated voices watermarked? On Naadly, yes: every render carries an inaudible AudioSeal watermark, is served with a header declaring it synthetic, and has a provenance record. It does not change what the audio sounds like, and it is not optional - it is what lets you answer a platform's disclosure field, a broadcaster or a procurement questionnaire.
- Do you need permission to clone someone's voice? Yes. Cloning an identifiable person without documented consent exposes you to personality and publicity claims and, increasingly, to specific AI statutes - and it is prohibited here. Naadly requires the speaker to record a consent statement aloud before a clone is created, and keeps that record with a hash of the reference clip as evidence.
- Can AI dubbing match lip movement? Naadly does not attempt lip sync. Dubs are timed to subtitle cues, which is correct for narration, interviews, courses and screencasts, and visibly wrong for close-up dialogue. If your footage has faces filling the frame, budget for a lip-sync tool or re-shoot - a dub that nearly matches is worse than one that clearly does not.
- What is the difference between voice cloning and a voice changer? Cloning builds a new voice from a reference recording and then reads any text in it. A voice changer converts one specific recording into an existing voice, keeping your timing, emphasis and emotion. If you need a voice to read future scripts, clone; if you need this line delivered well, use the changer.
- How many AI voices does Naadly have? 1,481 labelled voices across 11 catalogue languages, plus 23 Indian languages on a dedicated engine and 35 translation languages. Every voice is labelled for gender, accent, pace, tone and measured quality, and every one is cleared for commercial use with its licence and attribution line printed on its page.
- What audio formats can AI text to speech export? Naadly exports MP3 for video and the web, WAV for further editing, FLAC for archiving, OGG for the web and 8 kHz u-law for telephony, plus an SRT subtitle file timed from the render. MP3 for delivery, WAV or FLAC if anything downstream will process the audio again.
- Can you use AI voice-over in client work? Yes, and the practical requirement is evidence rather than permission: clients ask whose voice it is, whether it can run in a paid campaign, and whether it must be disclosed. Naadly prints each voice's model, licence and credit line, licenses commercial use on every plan, watermarks every render and keeps a provenance log.
- Is there a free text-to-speech API? Not on Naadly: API keys start on the $15 plan, because an open API on a free tier is a bill somebody else pays. The free tier is 30 minutes a month through the interface. Free API tiers elsewhere usually cap requests hard or reserve rights over your input.
- Is text to speech billed per character or per minute? Both models exist, and it changes how you work. Per-character billing makes every retry a small decision; Naadly meters minutes of audio - 30 free a month, 6,000 on $15, uncapped standard speech on $39 - because it runs its own models, so re-rendering a line eleven times costs almost nothing.
- How do you stop an AI voice mispronouncing a name? Add the word to the workspace pronunciation dictionary, spelled the way it should sound, once. Every voice, project, retry and teammate on the account inherits the fix from then on. Do it before a long render, not after finding the same name wrong in nineteen chapters.
- Can AI voices express emotion? Not reliably from text alone - which is why so many demos use the same upbeat register. The dependable route is speech to speech: record yourself delivering the line with the feeling you want and convert it to the target voice, which keeps your timing and emphasis and changes only the timbre.
- Can you delete your data from an AI voice service? On Naadly, an owner can export the whole workspace as JSON and delete it from Settings - accounts, projects, lines, jobs, cloned voices, usage and the audio in object storage, in the same request. Two things deliberately survive: cloning consent records, which protect the person who was cloned, and administrator audit entries.
- What happens to your audio if you cancel an AI voice subscription? On Naadly, files you already rendered stay yours and stay usable - the licence does not expire with the subscription. The account drops to the free tier's limits, paid features stop, and there is no refund for the remainder of a period; subscriptions are cancelled rather than refunded, with the statutory exceptions listed in the refunds policy.
Or just try it
Reading about a voice is a poor substitute for hearing one. Every voice has a free sample, the free plan needs no card, and the policies say what happens to your data before you sign up rather than after.