Speechify and its flagship text-to-speech model, SIMBA 3.2, were featured in VentureBeat on August 7, 2026, following the model's performance across two of the most widely consulted independent voice AI benchmarks. The article, written by Jon Stojan, covered how SIMBA 3.2 reached the top of both the Artificial Analysis text-to-speech leaderboard and Voice Arena, placing it alongside and above models from ElevenLabs, Cartesia, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind.
Both leaderboards rely on blind human listening evaluations rather than self-reported benchmarks, making placement on them a credible signal of real-world voice quality as perceived by actual listeners.
What VentureBeat Covered
The VentureBeat piece focused on how SIMBA 3.2 achieved its leaderboard position by treating quality, latency, and cost as interconnected priorities rather than optimizing for benchmark performance alone. The article quoted Rohan Pavuluri, Chief Business Officer of Speechify, on the company's approach: "We spent years improving how our models run cost efficiently because our consumer business required it and we produced some of the best voices on the planet. That investment is how we can now put the top TTS model in the world on our developer platform at about as cheap as it comes."
The article also featured a quote from Tyler Weitzman, who leads AI research at Speechify and co-founded the company alongside his brother Cliff Weitzman. Tyler traced the result back to his undergraduate years at Stanford, where an ML course project on fine-tuning Tacotron 2 first sparked his interest in voice AI. "My team's new model at Speechify just hit SOTA, five years later," he wrote. "It's pretty surreal looking back."
Cliff Weitzman, Founder and CEO of Speechify, described SIMBA 3.2 as built specifically for production-scale voice agent deployment. "In TTS APIs, three things matter: cost, quality, and latency. Simba 3.2 has achieved SOTA on this trifecta," Weitzman said in the piece.
Why the Coverage Matters
VentureBeat is one of the most widely read publications covering AI infrastructure and enterprise technology. Coverage in VentureBeat, particularly for a model ranking result validated by independent benchmarks rather than company-produced data, carries significant weight with the developer and enterprise audiences that evaluate voice AI providers for production deployments.
The VentureBeat piece noted that the same model powering Speechify's consumer platform of more than 60 million users is now available to developers through Speechify AI. The consumer platform's scale, more than 60 million users and millions of A/B tests run across real listening sessions, is what Speechify credits for the quality of the model that now sits atop independent developer benchmarks.
About SIMBA 3.2 and Speechify AI
SIMBA 3.2 is available to developers and enterprises through Speechify AI, alongside SIMBA Voice Agents, Speechify's enterprise platform for deploying conversational AI agents across customer support, lead qualification, outbound sales, and reception. The leaderboard rankings from Artificial Analysis and Voice Arena are publicly available and updated continuously. Additional languages and a lower-cost model tier are on the roadmap.
About Speechify
Speechify is a leading AI voice and productivity platform serving more than 60 million users worldwide. Its product ecosystem includes Text to Speech, Voice Typing Dictation, AI Podcasts, the Voice AI Assistant, and Speechify Work, a functionality that lets professionals delegate complex knowledge work to a team of AI agents. In 2025, Speechify received the Apple Design Award at WWDC, recognized as a critical resource for accessibility and productivity. Learn more at speechify.com and speechify.ai.