Palabra TTS v1 Palabra · text-to-speech (TTS) API

Speed

On Coval's 30-day window ending October 22, 2026 (2,898 runs from US East), Palabra TTS v1 starts speaking after 109.2 ms on a typical turn (median) and 205.3 ms on a slow turn (P95, the slowest one in twenty). That P95 is 9th lowest of the 32 models Coval measures, which puts it in the Fast enough tier: fast enough for most agents. On the median it is a tie (gap under 10 ms) with Alibaba Qwen3 TTS 1.7b, SpeechifyAI Simba 3.0 and SpeechifyAI Simba 3.2. Speko's board plots it at 86 ms time to first audio from US East; its model page reports a 72 ms sweep.

Voice quality

Speko rates its naturalness at 1,520 Elo from blind A/B votes on phone-agent lines (21st highest of the 43 models Speko rates).

Numbers and dates

Speko's pronunciation test on numbers, dates and currency scores it 0.16 on a 0-to-1 scale (28th highest of the 30 models Speko scores). This is the accuracy measure used here; Coval's word error rate separates models too little to compare them.

Price

Coval lists $12 per 1M characters (since Oct 13, 2026). Speko lists about $12. List prices, as each source prints them.