MAI-Voice-2.1 Hindi: six voices listed, and a Hindi request on Sume

Microsoft's Learn page for MAI-Voice-2.1 and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash lists six Hindi (hi-IN) voices: Arjun, Dhruv, Grant, Harper, Kavya and Priya (read 2026-10-05). They are not interchangeable. Arjun, Dhruv, Kavya and Priya list long emotion style sets (joyful, sad, surprised and more), and Dhruv, Kavya and Priya add shouting, softvoice and whispering. Grant lists only audiobook and neutral. Harper lists agent, customer_call_center, educational, narrator and neutral.

Pick by what the script does

• Announcements and explainers: a voice with narrator or educational.
• Support lines and IVR scripts: customer_call_center or agent.
• Story or ad reads: one of the voices with joyful, excited or whispering.

The same job on Sume

Sume TTS takes the language per request. For Hindi you send language: "hi" with a voice that speaks Hindi. Sume's voice library tags every voice with one of 16 languages, and hi is one of them, alongside en, ko, ja, zh, es, fr, de, pt, it, nl, pl, ru, sv, tr and tl. If a voice's language and the request disagree, Sume answers 409 tts_voice_language_mismatch before any job or charge, unless you send confirm_language_mismatch: true to override it.

Price for a Hindi script

Test before you commit

Write one 500-character Hindi paragraph with a price, a date and an English brand name. Render it with two voices on each service, play the files to a native speaker, and keep notes on numbers and the brand name, which is where mixed-script text usually slips. On Sume the renders cost a few cents. Repeat the test when a vendor ships a new version, since voice behavior can shift between releases.

What the table leaves out

Sume's cent rounding applies per job, so many short lines cost more than one long job. MAI-Voice-2.1 is a public preview without an SLA on Microsoft's page, and its cloning is gated. Sume's price includes its own margin over the provider list. The MAI prices come from Microsoft's model page, which lists $22 and $15 per 1M characters; the Learn page itself only points to Azure's pricing page, so confirm before you budget.