Japanese Text to Speech

Turn Japanese text into natural speech with AI voices. 13 voices. Free, no signup — download as MP3 or WAV.

Sign up for 5,000 character limit

Wrap your text in SSML tags for precise control:

<speak><prosody rate="slow">Slow speech</prosody></speak>

Tags the selected model understands — click to drop one into your text where it happens:

This model reads plain text, so inline tags are ignored. For tag-based emotion, switch to an expressive model like Orpheus or Bark.

Define custom pronunciations (word = pronunciation):

-12 +12
0.5x 2.0x
Free with Piper, VITS, MeloTTS
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About Japanese text to speech

Japanese text-to-speech is governed by pitch accent rather than stress: each word has a fixed high-low pitch pattern, and getting it wrong makes a voice sound foreign even when every syllable is correct — for instance "hashi" can mean bridge or chopsticks depending on the accent. The writing system mixes Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana with no spaces, so the engine must segment text and pick the right reading for Kanji that have several (端 vs 橋 vs 箸). Standard (Tokyo) accent is the default for most synthesis, while regional varieties such as Kansai have a different pitch pattern entirely.

Sample — 日本語

“今日はとても良い天気なので、みんなで公園へ散歩に出かけて、美味しいお弁当を食べましょう。”

Native name
日本語
Speakers
about 125 million speakers, almost entirely in Japan
Language family
Japonic (generally treated as a language isolate at family level)
Script
Mixed Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana
Spoken in
Japan, with small communities in Brazil, Hawaii and immigrant populations

13 Japanese voices

Japanese Speaker 1

Bark
Standard Neutral

Japanese Speaker 2

Bark
Standard Neutral

Japanese Speaker

Bark Small
Standard Neutral

Japanese Female

CosyVoice 2
Standard Female

Japanese Female

CosyVoice3
Standard Female

Default (Japanese)

Darwin TTS
Standard Neutral

Japanese Default

GPT-SoVITS
Standard Neutral

Alpha

Kokoro
Free Female

Gongitsune

Kokoro
Free Female

Japanese

MeloTTS
Free Female

Japanese

MOSS-TTS Nano
Standard Neutral

Japanese

OpenVoice
Premium Neutral

Ono Anna

Qwen3 TTS
Standard Female

What people use Japanese text to speech for

Anime, VTuber and game character dubbing
Train, subway and station announcements
E-learning and JLPT study narration
Audiobook and light-novel narration
Customer-service and navigation voice prompts

Japanese Text to Speech — FAQ

The engine predicts each word's high-low pitch pattern in context, which is what distinguishes pairs like 橋 (hashi, bridge) from 箸 (hashi, chopsticks) and makes the voice sound natural.

Yes. It segments unspaced Japanese text, converts Kanji to the correct reading and handles Katakana loanwords and Hiragana grammar together.

Mostly yes. Readings such as 生 (sei, nama, i-) or names are chosen from context, though uncommon proper nouns can occasionally be ambiguous.

Voices use Standard (Tokyo) pitch accent, which is the norm for narration, announcements and most media; full Kansai-accent synthesis is a different dialect pattern.

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