Rime
Text-to-speech built for phone conversations, with realistic conversational voices.
why this verdict
Keep paying — OpenAI has not replaced it
OpenAI's version overlaps, but does not finish the voice & audio job, so this one still earns its $100/mo.
- A named launch, not a vibe named, unlinked
- ElevenLabs and OpenAI realtime voice bundling speech into platforms developers already use. OpenAI, October 1, 2025 — no announcement link recorded yet.
- How much of the job it covers not the job editorial call
- Parts of it. The job still needs the tool to get finished.
- Is there a free way to do it? yes
- 1 of 3 listed replacements have a usable free tier: ElevenLabs.
- What the call is worth $1,200/yr
- $100/mo at the entry paid tier — $1,200 a year per seat.
- Threatened by
- OpenAI
- Since
- October 1, 2025
- List price
- $100/mo
- Per year
- $1,200
The backstory
Rime went after a specific weakness in the voice market: most text-to-speech is trained on audiobook narration and sounds wrong on a phone call, missing the hesitations and casual delivery of real speech. Its voices are recorded from everyday speakers rather than voice actors, which suits contact centre and drive-through deployments where sounding like a narrator is the tell. Competing with ElevenLabs on general quality would be futile, and telephony latency and realism is a defensible corner.
Escape hatches
Very low latency voices for realtime agents
cartesia.ai open_in_newBroadest voice library and best general quality
elevenlabs.io open_in_newSpeech recognition and synthesis for voice agents
deepgram.com open_in_new1 of 3 replacements have a usable free tier.