Azure Speech is Microsoft's cloud speech service for text to speech, speech to text, translation and voice agents, now sold as part of Microsoft Foundry. The free F0 tier includes 0.5 million neural text-to-speech characters a month.
Azure Speech, now branded Azure Speech in Foundry Tools, is Microsoft's cloud service for building speech into applications and agents. For text to speech it offers prebuilt neural voices and lets organizations build custom neural voices for a branded sound, along with speaking styles. The same service transcribes speech to text, with captioning in more than 100 languages, translates audio or text, analyzes call recordings and supports talking avatars. Microsoft also offers voice agents through its Voice Live API, now in public preview in Microsoft Foundry, and states that Speech models can be deployed in the cloud or elsewhere to fit data requirements.
Pricing is pay-as-you-go by usage, with a free F0 tier. The free tier includes 0.5 million neural text-to-speech characters per month and 5 audio hours of speech to text per month, plus 5 audio hours of speech translation. Standard paid rates for neural and HD voices are listed on Microsoft's pricing page; the text-to-speech rate table did not display in full during this review, so this page does not quote it. The Voice Live API is billed per million tokens, with different rates for text and audio and for standard and custom voices.
Azure Speech is aimed at developers and businesses already on Azure. Expect to set up an Azure account and resource and to work through an SDK or REST API rather than a consumer app. The old AI Services text-to-speech address now redirects to the Foundry Tools page.
There is a free F0 tier that includes 0.5 million neural text-to-speech characters per month. Beyond that, usage is billed pay-as-you-go at the rates on Microsoft's pricing page.
It is the current name for Azure AI Speech, Microsoft's speech service. The old AI Services product page now redirects to the Foundry Tools speech page.
Website: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/ai-foundry/tools/speech
Company: Microsoft
Microsoft's developer speech service with neural and custom voices, transcription and translation, now under Foundry Tools. Free tier of 0.5M neural characters a month; pay-as-you-go after. See pricing page for rates.
| Pricing model | Freemium |
|---|---|
| Free tier | Yes · F0: 0.5 million neural TTS characters per month; 5 audio hours speech to text per month |
| Starting price | Not verified |
| Data residency | Not verified |
| Compliance (as stated by vendor) | Not verified |
| Integrations | Not verified |
| Public API | Yes |
| Self-hostable | Not verified |
| Official site | Not verified |
| Can a general AI assistant replace it? | Consumer chatbots can read text aloud, but not at scale through an API with custom brand voices. Use Azure Speech for apps, IVR and agents built on Azure. |
| Last verified | 2026-10-12 by editor |
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