What does one minute of AI speech cost? Gemini, MAI, Voxtral and Sume

At an assumed 900 characters per minute of speech, one finished minute costs about 1.4 cents on MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash, 2.0 cents on MAI-Voice-2.1, 1.4 cents on Voxtral TTS, 4.3 cents on Sume TTS, and 0.9 to 1.4 cents on Gemini 3.8 through December 31, 2026. The assumption is mine: 15 characters per second, so check your own scripts.

How the conversion works

Vendors price differently, so convert everything to dollars per minute of audio.

• Per character: price per 1,000 characters times 0.9.
• Gemini lists audio output per million tokens and gives about $0.00225 per 10 seconds for Flash TTS and $0.0015 for Flash-Lite through 2026, so multiply by 6.
• Text input tokens on Gemini add a small extra; the page lists $0.50 per million through 2026.
• Sume's job rounds up to a whole cent, with a one-cent minimum.

The table

All numbers are list prices, read from vendor pages and Sume's rate card.

What the price does not show

Sume's price covers a stored job record and a durable media URL. A raw per-character speech price excludes joining, captions and render.

A 60-second narration at 900 characters costs 5 cents on Sume after rounding, with a one-cent minimum per job and a 95-cent ceiling at 20,000 characters. Use dry_run on the MCP tool for an exact preview.

When the gap matters

At 1,000 minutes a month the difference between 1.4 and 4.3 cents is about $29. For a small studio that is noise; for an audiobook catalog it is a line item. Test voice quality first and price second.