New Free Gemini Voices, in 100+ Languages
Four new voices, powered by Google's Gemini, available on every plan and in more than 100 languages.
I'm really happy to announce that we just released four new voices, powered by Google's Gemini. They're available on every plan, including Free, and they speak more than 100 languages.
A game changer
I've been planning to dive deep into the new Gemini voices, but I decided to bring forward the release of a first selection, because even just these 4 new voices are such a game changer, particularly for free and non-English users.
Our free non-English voices have been low quality since launch, so the free plan has only really been usable in English.
In the last couple of months, our users created meditations in 20 different languages. A third of those meditations were not in English.
This growth surprised me. Recently, some of you even tried languages that our premium voices don't support yet, such as Persian and Estonian.
Gemini voices are a big deal because they are more affordable than our premium voices, and at the same time they support almost any language.
Officially, Google lists 100+ languages, but we tested languages even outside that list, such as Thai and Swedish (or even Māori), and we found them to work reasonably well.
Meet the voices
This first lineup includes 2 male and 2 female voices, chosen and adapted from the list of the Gemini studio voices.
I've curated these voices to try to find safe, universal options that would work well with most meditations.
These voices are experimental. In some ways, they're even better than our premium voices. They're more expressive and more emotive, and they can bring real warmth to a meditation.
But that expressiveness can also make it harder to fit the context. Sometimes a voice doesn't strike the best tone for the passage it's reading.
So for the most consistent delivery, our premium voices are still the safer choice.
Discounted and more affordable
Gemini voices cost less than our premium voices, and until the end of the year, Google is even offering them at half price. We're passing that discount on to you.
Here's how many credits the voice uses in a 30-minute meditation:
This is just the start
Gemini voices can do much more than these four voices show. I plan to bring two of their features into Open Meadow.
The first is designing a voice from a description. Instead of picking from a list, you'll describe the voice you want: its age, its tone, its character.
The second is directing how a voice reads. We can ask a voice to read more slowly, in a different tone, or with a different accent, and we can change this for each passage. One part could be soft and slow, and the next more energetic.
Try them out
To try them, you can paste a script into the Instant Meditation Player on our home page, without an account, or sign up and ask Omi, our chat assistant, to create a meditation for you.
Either way, you'll find the new voices in Playback Settings, in the Gemini voices group. Pick one and hear how it sounds in your language.
And please let me know what you think. Do you like them? Did something sound wrong? How do they work in your language? Your feedback will help decide where these voices go next.