How many characters is a minute of speech?
Text-to-speech vendors put one minute of generated speech at 720 to 1,000 characters of text: about 1,000 by ElevenLabs and Murf, 750 to 800 by Cartesia and about 720 by Amazon Polly. So 1 million characters is roughly 16 hours 40 minutes to 23 hours 8 minutes of speech, and a 5-minute speech is about 3,600 to 5,000 characters.
Convert characters and minutes
| Vendor's figure | 1,000,000 characters run | Characters in 5 minutes |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Polly 720 a minute | 23 h 8 min | 3,600 |
| Cartesia 750 to 800 a minute | 20 h 50 min to 22 h 13 min | 3,750 to 4,000 |
| ElevenLabs and Murf 1,000 a minute | 16 h 40 min | 5,000 |
How many characters is a 1, 2, 5 or 10-minute speech?
| Speech | Amazon Polly | Cartesia | ElevenLabs and Murf |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 min | 720 | 750 to 800 | 1,000 |
| 2 min | 1,440 | 1,500 to 1,600 | 2,000 |
| 3 min | 2,160 | 2,250 to 2,400 | 3,000 |
| 5 min | 3,600 | 3,750 to 4,000 | 5,000 |
| 10 min | 7,200 | 7,500 to 8,000 | 10,000 |
| 30 min | 21,610 | 22,500 to 24,000 | 30,000 |
| 1 hour | 43,230 | 45,000 to 48,000 | 60,000 |
Characters of text, rounded to the nearest 10, at each vendor's stated pace: 720 a minute for Amazon Polly, 750 to 800 a minute for Cartesia and 1,000 a minute for ElevenLabs and Murf.
How many minutes is 1 million characters?
| Text | Amazon Polly | Cartesia | ElevenLabs and Murf |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | 1m 23s | 1m 15s to 1m 20s | 1m |
| 10,000 | 14m | 13m | 10m |
| 100,000 | 2h 19m | 2h 5m to 2h 13m | 1h 40m |
| 1 million | 23h 8m | 20h 50m to 22h 13m | 16h 40m |
Characters of text, and the length of speech in hours (h), minutes (m) and seconds (s) at each vendor's stated pace.
Amazon's worked examples
Amazon's pricing page gives the speech length of real texts, which shows how much one vendor's figure moves from text to text:
| Text | Characters | Speech | A minute |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 million characters | 1,000,000 | 23 h 8 min | 720 |
| A one-page letter | 1,300 | 1 min 40 s | 780 |
| An average email | 3,100 | 4 min | 775 |
| A news article | 6,500 | 9 min | 722 |
| A Christmas Carol | 165,000 | 3 h 50 min | 717 |
| Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | 600,000 | 13 h 50 min | 723 |
Amazon writes the counts as "~1.3k characters" and "~600k characters"; the last column is characters divided by Amazon's stated length.
What does a million characters cost?
APIs bill the text, not the speech, so a million characters costs the same however long it runs. Per hour of speech, the price moves with the pace:
| API and voice | 1M characters | Per hour of speech |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Polly Standard | $4 | $0.173 to $0.24 |
| Google Cloud Standard voices | $4 | $0.173 to $0.24 |
| Google Cloud WaveNet voices | $4 | $0.173 to $0.24 |
| Murf API, Falcon | $10 | $0.432 to $0.60 |
| Azure AI Speech Neural | $15 | $0.648 to $0.90 |
| Deepgram Aura-1 | $15 | $0.648 to $0.90 |
| Fish Audio API, S2.1-Pro Billed per UTF-8 byte: a character in plain English | $15 | $0.648 to $0.90 |
| OpenAI tts-1 | $15 | $0.648 to $0.90 |
| Amazon Polly Neural | $16 | $0.692 to $0.96 |
| Google Cloud Neural2 voices | $16 | $0.692 to $0.96 |
| Azure AI Speech Neural HD | $22 | $0.951 to $1.32 |
| Amazon Polly Generative | $30 | $1.30 to $1.80 |
| Deepgram Aura-2 | $30 | $1.30 to $1.80 |
| Google Cloud Chirp 3: HD voices | $30 | $1.30 to $1.80 |
| Murf API, Gen2 | $30 | $1.30 to $1.80 |
| OpenAI tts-1-hd | $30 | $1.30 to $1.80 |
| ElevenLabs API, Flash / Turbo | $40 | $1.73 to $2.40 |
| ElevenLabs API, v2 Multilingual | $80 | $3.46 to $4.80 |
| Amazon Polly Long-Form | $100 | $4.32 to $6 |
| Google Cloud Studio voices | $160 | $6.92 to $9.60 |
Per hour at 720 to 1,000 characters a minute, list price, before any free allowance. Resemble AI Flex pay-as-you-go bills by the length of the audio instead, so text length makes no difference there. Gemini bills in tokens, mostly for the audio, so text length makes little difference there either.
What counts as a character?
Google spells it out: "The total number of characters in the input string are counted for billing purposes, including spaces and newline characters. All Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) tags (except the <mark> tag) are also included in the character count."
On ElevenLabs' app plans a character is a credit, so a minute of speech is about 1,000 credits by ElevenLabs' own figure; see ElevenLabs credits explained.
Quick answers
How many characters is a minute of speech?
720 to 1,000 characters, going by the vendors' own figures: about 1,000 by ElevenLabs and Murf, 750 to 800 by Cartesia and about 720 by Amazon Polly.
How many minutes is 1 million characters?
16 hours 40 minutes at 1,000 characters a minute (ElevenLabs and Murf), 20 hours 50 minutes to 22 hours 13 minutes at 750 to 800 characters a minute (Cartesia) and 23 hours 8 minutes at 720 characters a minute (Amazon Polly).
How many characters is a 5-minute speech?
About 3,600 characters at Amazon Polly's pace and 5,000 at ElevenLabs and Murf's.
How long is 1,000 characters of speech?
1 minute at 1,000 characters a minute (ElevenLabs and Murf), 1 minute 23 seconds at Amazon Polly's pace.
How many ElevenLabs credits is a minute of audio?
About 1,000. ElevenLabs charges 1 credit per character of text to speech on its app plans and says: "One minute of audio costs approximately 1000 characters."
Which figure should you use?
Each is a vendor's own approximation ("approximately", "~"), so treat them as a range rather than a rule. This site's per-minute prices use 900 characters a minute for every vendor, inside that range, so no vendor looks cheaper because of its own estimate; see the methodology. To price your own script at your own pace, use the text-to-speech cost calculator or, for a whole book, the AI audiobook cost calculator.
Sources
- ElevenLabs pricing, read on 7 October 2026
- Murf pricing, read on 5 October 2026
- Cartesia pricing, read on 7 October 2026
- Amazon Polly pricing, read on 7 October 2026
Show the quoted text
On our highest quality models, 1 character costs 1 credit. One minute of audio costs approximately 1000 characters.
elevenlabs.io/pricing/api
Text-to-Speech 100K Characters ~ 1h 40m of speech generated $1
murf.ai/pricing. Murf's pricing-page calculator for its Falcon API.
Sonic text-to-speech: One minute of audio generation requires 750-800 credits. 1 credit equals 1 character.
cartesia.ai/pricing
Pricing Examples Example Text Length Speech Duration Standard TTS Cost Neural TTS Cost Long-form TTS Cost Generative TTS Cost
aws.amazon.com/polly/pricing/
1,000 requests, 1,000 characters per request 1 million characters ~23 hours, 8 min $4.00 $16.00 $100.00 $30.00
aws.amazon.com/polly/pricing/
2016 Amazon Shareholders Letter 1.3k characters, single page ~1 min. 40 sec $0.005 $0.021 $0.13 $0.04
aws.amazon.com/polly/pricing/
Average email message ~3.1k characters ~4 min $0.01 $0.05 $0.31 $0.09
aws.amazon.com/polly/pricing/
Typical news article ~6.5k characters, three pages ~9 min $0.03 $0.10 $0.65 $0.20
aws.amazon.com/polly/pricing/
"A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens ~165k characters, 64 pages ~3 hours 50 min $0.66 $2.64 $16.50 $4.95
aws.amazon.com/polly/pricing/
"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain ~600k characters, 224 pages ~13 hours 50 min $2.40 $9.60 $60.00 $18.00
aws.amazon.com/polly/pricing/
Amazon's examples come from its table with the columns: Example, Text Length, Speech Duration, then the cost on Standard, Neural, Long-form and Generative voices.
Prices on this page were checked against the official pricing pages on .