900,000 characters of narration: MAI-Voice-2.1 vs Sume TTS

Microsoft AI lists MAI-Voice-2.1 at $22 per 1M characters of generated speech, so 900,000 characters cost $19.80 direct. Sume's TTS 1.0 is billed at $0.0475 per 1,000 characters, rounded up to the cent on each job, and a job takes 1 to 20,000 characters: 900,000 characters is 45 jobs and $42.75.

Microsoft's figure is from its MAI-Voice-2.1 page, read 2026-10-10; Microsoft lists 23 languages for both voices. Sume's rate is the TTS 1.0 line on the API pricing page. The two products differ in voices and engine, so this is a price table and not a quality ranking.

What does 900,000 characters cost?

Per-character cost is the same in both routes; the only structural difference is Sume's per-job cent rounding and 20,000-character job size.

How do I split a script into Sume jobs?

Count the characters first and split at sentence ends so no job exceeds 20,000. This snippet only does the arithmetic; it calls no API.

import math
import pathlib

text = pathlib.Path("script.txt").read_text()
n = len(text)
jobs = math.ceil(n / 20000)
sizes = [min(20000, n - i * 20000) for i in range(jobs)]
cents = sum(-(-size * 475 // 100000) for size in sizes)
print(f"{n} characters, {jobs} job(s), {cents} cents")

What this comparison leaves out

Treat the numbers as list prices.

• Microsoft's page does not say how it counts characters for markup or pauses.
• Voice choice, language coverage and latency differ; Flash is a latency-focused variant.
• The snippet counts Python characters; confirm the count matches how the API counts your text.