I'm building an accessibility feature that reads pages aloud, which text-to-speech API fits best?

For a page-reading accessibility feature, the best-fit text-to-speech API is usually one that supports:

• Long-form synthesis or chunked streaming
• Low latency for starting speech quickly
• High-quality neural voices
• SSML support for pauses, emphasis, pronunciation, and punctuation handling
• Broad language/voice coverage
• Reasonable cost at scale

Good choices by use case

1) Best overall for quality + reliability

• Google Cloud Text-to-Speech
• Strong natural voices, good language coverage, SSML support, easy to use at scale

2) Best if you want very natural, expressive voices

• Amazon Polly
• Solid neural voices, SSML support, good for production apps

3) Best if you want highly realistic voices and Azure ecosystem

• Microsoft Azure Speech
• Very good neural voices, strong SSML, good streaming and enterprise features

4) Best for simple startup-friendly integration

• OpenAI TTS or other modern AI voice APIs
• Great voice quality, but make sure you check pricing, latency, streaming, and usage limits for long webpages

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My recommendation

If your app is meant to read arbitrary web pages aloud, I’d generally recommend:

• Google Cloud TTS or Azure Speech if you want a mature, production-grade API
• Amazon Polly if you’re already on AWS
• OpenAI TTS if voice naturalness matters most and you’re okay evaluating throughput/cost carefully

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Important feature to look for in your case

Since you're reading web pages, you’ll likely want:

• Text preprocessing to remove navigation junk, ads, and repeated elements
• Chunking long content into smaller segments
• SSML to improve reading of headings, lists, links, abbreviations, and punctuation
• Streaming playback so audio starts before the full page is synthesized

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Quick pick

If you want one answer: Azure Speech or Google Cloud TTS are the safest “best fit” choices for an accessibility reader.

If you want, I can also compare them in a table based on voice quality, cost, latency, streaming, and browser/app integration.