LOVO, WellSaid and Google Cloud for AI Narration: What Authors Can Verify

WellSaid is the only one of these three whose plans we could read, and its monthly plans give 20 or 180 minutes, so a full novel needs several months or an annual plan. LOVO's pricing, terms and help pages were all unreadable on 2026-11-08. Google Cloud's long-form audio is a developer service still labelled Preview, and its price table could not be read. Neither can be priced or recommended from sources we could read.

Where these tools' files can go

On 2026-11-08, none of WellSaid, LOVO, Google Cloud or Amazon Polly is named by a store rule we read, and "not named" is not the same as refused. ACX requires human narration unless authorized. Spotify accepts digital voice narration from "providers like Google Play Books, ElevenLabs, and more" without listing the rest. Voices by INaudio accepts only unmodified LPF packages from Google Play Books, ElevenLabs and Spoken Press. Kobo's audiobook FAQ, as captured on 2026-11-08, accepts AI narration with a "Synthesized Voice" label and names no providers. Note that Google Play Books appears as a provider name on the Spotify and INaudio pages, but those pages name Google Play Books, not Google Cloud, and we do not know what they accept beyond that.

One route is open to any of them on paper. Author's Republic's FAQ says it accepts AI titles "created with any AI engine" if quality and technical requirements are met, and that partners decide what they carry. We did not read those technical requirements. See audiobook distributors compared for the limits of that route.

The four services on documented criteria

This matrix shows what could be read on 2026-11-08, and it makes no judgment about sound. "Could not be read" marks a gap in our reading, not a missing feature.

WellSaid

WellSaid's plans are readable. Its pricing page, read on 2026-11-08 through an extraction tool, lists:

Starter lists all English voices and MP3 export; Business lists MP3, WAV, OGG and TXT; Pro's export list is inconsistent on the page (the table says MP3 and TXT, the FAQ says MP3 only). Sample rates are 24 kHz on lower tiers and up to 48 kHz on Pro and Business. The page mentions no voice cloning.

For a 90,000-word novel, ACX's 2013 figure of about 9,300 words per finished hour gives roughly 580 minutes (our estimate, one clean pass). That is more than twice Starter's yearly allowance and, at Pro's monthly 180 minutes, about four months at $49 ($196). Pro annual's 2,160 minutes cover it at $396 a year. Whether unused minutes roll over was not stated.

The billing choice changes the sum more than the plan name does. These are estimates: 20% is our assumed retake margin, and monthly plans are counted in whole months.

For one book, Pro monthly is the lowest sum on this table. Pro annual only makes sense if you plan further titles within the year.

WellSaid does market to audiobook authors. Its audiobooks page describes a custom phonetic library for character names, series-ready voice profiles and chapter-level updates, and says its voices are built from licensed voice actors recorded in studio. It also says you can export narration formatted for Audible, Apple Books, Spotify and other platforms. That is a seller's statement about file formatting, not a store's acceptance: ACX's rule still requires human narration unless authorized, and neither Spotify nor INaudio names WellSaid. The page's FAQ showed questions only when read, so its answers are unread.

Downsides: the real commercial-rights document, WellSaid's services agreement, was not read, and we could not locate it; the website terms (effective July 9, 2025) cover the website only. WellSaid's pricing and audiobooks pages say nothing about cloning, so ask WellSaid before you count on it; it is not named by Spotify or INaudio.

LOVO

LOVO's pages did not load, so no LOVO prices, rights or cloning terms are stated here. On 2026-11-08, its pricing page and a help-centre article returned HTTP 402 Payment Required, and its terms failed with an SSL handshake error. We did not try to get around either. Search-result snippets of those pages show figures, but a snippet is not a reading, and search-result snippets and third-party listings show figures that conflict, so we leave them out.

What you can do: open LOVO's live pricing and terms in a browser and check the plan price, the allowance, whether commercial use covers audiobooks, and what cloning requires. The cost calculator lists LOVO with no price for that reason. Skip LOVO until you have read its terms yourself.

Before you pay, get written answers to these points, since each one is unknown to us:

• How many minutes or characters a plan gives, and whether a book-length project fits.
• Whether the licence covers selling audiobooks on retail platforms.
• Which export formats and bit rates each plan provides.
• What cloning requires, including consent and any verification.
• What happens to your projects and voices if you cancel.

LOVO is also not named by Spotify or INaudio on the pages we read, so INaudio's digital voice route is closed to it under that FAQ's wording.

Google Cloud Text-to-Speech and Long Audio Synthesis

Google Cloud's Long Audio Synthesis is a developer service marked Preview, which means a non-developer author would need technical help to use it. Its documentation describes asynchronous requests with input up to 1 million bytes, with output written to Cloud Storage (for example as .wav), and says it is subject to Pre-GA terms.

The page describes no author-facing app. Before the first request it requires a Google Cloud project with billing enabled, a storage bucket with specific access roles, and the Google Cloud command-line tool. A request creates one output file at the path you give, so a book needs one request per chapter if your store expects chapter files. That last step is our inference from the documented request format.

"Preview" has consequences you can read. Google's Pre-GA Offerings Terms say such offerings are provided "as is", may be changed, suspended or discontinued at any time without prior notice, and are not covered by any SLA. Do not build a series workflow on a feature with those terms unless you can move elsewhere.

A 90,000-word manuscript is about 540,000 characters at the 6 characters per word we assume in the calculator, so it likely fits the input limit, but check your own file, since bytes can exceed characters and Google's page says the exact limit can vary by input.

Google's pricing page returned only its title twice, so no price is quoted. Search snippets show figures we do not reproduce. Skip Google Cloud if you do not have a developer to help or need a price before you decide. Google Cloud is also separate from Google Play Books auto-narration, which is the author-facing product that Spotify and INaudio name.

Amazon Polly

Amazon Polly publishes per-character prices, and they are the only developer-service numbers we could read. Polly's pricing page, which shows no effective date, lists per million characters: Standard $4.00, Neural $16.00, Long-Form $100.00 and Generative $30.00 (speech requests only). Free tiers per month are Standard 5 million characters (no duration stated) and, for the first 12 months, Neural 1 million, Long-Form 500,000 and Generative 100,000.

At 540,000 characters (our assumption of 6 per word), one pass is about $8.64 at Neural and $54.00 at Long-Form, before retakes. That is arithmetic on the listed rates, not a quote.

The 20% margin is our assumption. These sums ignore the free tier, which could cover a Standard or Neural pass in a month if your account qualifies. Long-Form's 500,000 free characters would leave 40,000 to pay for, about $4.00 on one pass. None of this includes the developer time to split a book and assemble the audio. The page describes a price list, not an audiobook workflow, and we did not read Polly's terms or any export specification. We did not read Polly's request limits, so we cannot say how a book would be split. It does not suit anyone expecting an upload-and-narrate app.

Which of the three to consider

For an author who wants a published price today, WellSaid is the only one of the three with readable prices; work out your own minutes before choosing a plan. LOVO needs you to read it first, and Google Cloud needs a developer. For tools with named store routes, see ElevenLabs vs Murf vs Speechify and the best AI audiobook generators. To judge any of these by ear, run a same-chapter comparison, and see the AI audiobooks hub for the wider workflow.

Last verified 2026-11-08. Rules and prices change: check the linked primary page before you rely on this.