Play.ht
Discontinued. Meta acquired the team behind Play.ht (PlayAI) in July 2025 and the service was permanently shut down December 31, 2025. Use ElevenLabs, Murf, or Fliki instead.
The verdict on Play.ht: Historical reference only, this service is no longer operating Play.ht is built for volume, specifically for podcasters, audiobook producers, and L&D teams that need natural-sounding narration across many languages and can't afford the scheduling friction of booking voice talent repeatedly. Pricing: Discontinued (shut down Dec 31, 2025). Last reviewed: August 2026.
Best For
Historical reference only, this service is no longer operating
Standout Feature
Formerly a 900+ voice library across 142 languages, before Meta's acquihire shut it down
TL;DR
Discontinued. Do not sign up for this expecting a live product, use ElevenLabs, Murf, or Fliki.
Alternatives
Overview
Play.ht, later rebranded PlayAI, was an AI text-to-speech platform and voice cloning service designed for professional audio production, podcasters, audiobook producers, corporate L&D teams, and product developers who need natural-sounding speech at scale. Meta acquired the PlayAI team in July 2025 in an acquihire, and the service was permanently shut down on December 31, 2025, with the public API taken offline earlier that year. The domain no longer resolves. The description below is preserved for historical reference; do not sign up expecting an active product, and route to ElevenLabs, Murf, or Fliki instead.
Its library exceeds 900 AI voices across 142 languages and accents, with the most realistic voices produced by its PlayDialog and PlayHT 2.0 Turbo models that generate speech with emotional inflection, natural pacing, and conversational filler rather than flat robotic delivery. The voice cloning feature creates a personal voice model from 30 seconds of clean audio, the fastest minimum sample in the category, though longer samples improve accuracy. Play.ht's API enables text-to-speech integration into applications, chatbots, and content pipelines with streaming support for low-latency voice responses. The podcast hosting feature distributes AI-narrated content directly to major podcast directories.
Free accounts provide 10,000 characters per month. Creator plans start at $31.20/month for 100,000 characters and commercial rights. Play.ht competes primarily with ElevenLabs, its differentiator is voice cloning speed and the breadth of the multilingual voice library, though ElevenLabs leads in raw speech quality for English-language production.
Our Take
The 900-plus voice library across 142 languages is the main differentiator here, not any single voice quality. Costs climb at high production volume, so the Unlimited plan at $99 per month is the one that actually makes sense for teams publishing content at scale, not casual users.
Key Features
- 800+ AI voices
- 142 languages
- Voice cloning
- Real-time streaming TTS
- Voice API
- • Enormous voice library
- • Excellent for podcast monetization
- • Good API
- • Voice cloning is fast
- • Can get expensive at high volume
- • Some voices still sound synthetic
- • Interface has learning curve
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Workflows Using This Tool
Step-by-step playbooks that put Play.ht to work.
From the Blog
Coverage and comparisons that mention Play.ht.