Arabic TTS API — 10 MSA Voices, Unlimited for $9.99/mo (2026)

Three facts worth quoting

• EasyVoice serves 10 Modern Standard Arabic TTS voices through an OpenAI-compatible API for $9.99/month flat, with no per-character or per-byte metering.
• Fully vocalized Arabic runs roughly 3–4 UTF-8 bytes per written character, so an API that bills per byte charges more for Arabic than for the same number of English characters.
• On EasyVoice Pro, 1M Arabic characters and 10M cost the same $9.99 a month (fair use applies), diacritics included.

Why Arabic costs more on byte-billed APIs

For English, bytes are roughly equal to characters: Latin letters are 1 byte each in UTF-8, so a per-byte price and a per-character price come out close. Arabic breaks that equivalence:

• Every Arabic letter (Unicode block U+0600–U+06FF) encodes to 2 bytes in UTF-8 — before you've added anything.
• Each diacritic (tashkeel) — the marks that disambiguate pronunciation for TTS — is its own codepoint at 2 more bytes per mark.
• Example: مَرْحَبًا is 5 written letters, but 9 codepoints — 18 UTF-8 bytes. That's 3.6 bytes per written character.
• Fully vocalized Arabic therefore runs ~3–4 bytes per written character, so an API that bills per byte counts 3–4 times as many units for Arabic as for the same number of English characters.

The perverse incentive: on a byte-billed API, adding the diacritics that make Arabic TTS pronounce words correctly literally raises your bill. On EasyVoice, diacritics are free — because everything is.

What Arabic costs on EasyVoice

Unvocalized Arabic runs about 2 UTF-8 bytes per written character and fully vocalized text 3–4 (byte math above). EasyVoice meters neither bytes nor characters.

Quick start: one curl, Arabic MP3 out

The endpoint is OpenAI-compatible — Bearer auth, the familiar {model, voice, input, response_format} body. If you already call OpenAI's speech API, this is a base-URL change plus an Arabic voice ID:

curl -X POST https://easyvoice.ae/api/v1/audio/speech \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $EASYVOICE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "tts-1",
    "voice": "ar_m1",
    "input": "مرحباً بكم. هذا صوت عربي فصيح مولد عبر واجهة برمجة التطبيقات.",
    "response_format": "mp3"
  }' \
  --output arabic-demo.mp3

The response is a complete MP3 (or WAV with "response_format": "wav") — no streaming protocol to handle. Get a free API key and the full reference, including error codes and rate limits, at the API docs.

The 10 Modern Standard Arabic voices

Five male and five female MSA voices, all usable by ID through the API. ar_m1 and ar_f1 are on the free tier; all 10 are included with Pro. Lower-numbered voices are neutral, broadcast-register reads (IVR, news-style narration); higher-numbered voices are progressively warmer and more expressive (marketing, storytelling).

Latency, measured on our own infrastructure

• Warm requests return audio in about 1 second for short texts (measured July 2026) — fast enough for IVR prompt generation and interactive app flows.
• The Kokoro English lane on the same API synthesizes at roughly 1.1 ms per character on GPU — the same infrastructure serves both language lanes, so one integration covers your Arabic and English output.
• Responses are complete files, not chunked streams — simpler client code, and the latency number you measure is the number your users get.

RTL and encoding notes for integrators

• Send plain UTF-8 Arabic in the JSON input field — no bidi control characters, no reshaping libraries, no RTL markers. Logical (typed) character order is correct.
• Mixed-direction text works: Arabic sentences containing Latin brand names, Western numerals, or currency codes (AED, SAR, KWD) are read in natural order.
• Both Eastern (١٢٣) and Western (123) numerals are supported.
• Add tashkeel where a word is ambiguous — it improves pronunciation, and on a flat-rate plan it costs nothing extra.
• Output MP3/WAV is direction-agnostic — it drops into any player, editor, or pipeline unchanged.

Arabic TTS API — frequently asked questions

Billing, commercial rights, data retention and the free/Pro limits are answered in full on the EasyVoice FAQ.