MiniMax Audio

MiniMax Audio is what happens when the lab behind Hailuo video points the same firepower at speech. The Speech model family lands near the top of independent TTS quality rankings, clones a voice from roughly ten seconds of audio, and speaks 40+ languages with emotion and sound-effect tags that give scripts an almost director-level layer of control. The smartest part of the offer is the on-ramp: logging in grants free daily credits, so you can prototype narration or app voices without spending anything, then graduate to a $5 Starter subscription or the pay-as-you-go API. The caveats are structural rather than qualitative. This is a product line inside the sprawling MiniMax platform, so the experience is more utilitarian than ElevenLabs' creator ecosystem; the points system takes trial and error to translate into real-world cost; and unlike Fish Audio there is no open-source release to fall back on. Our advice: if you already use Hailuo or the MiniMax API, adding Audio is a no-brainer — and even if you do not, the free tier makes trying it essentially risk-free.