Free French text to speech: what \"free\" really covers
Quota, voice watermark, commercial-use rights, data sent: what the word free hides, and the exact breakdown of our own trial, with no flattering rounding.
"Free French text to speech" is an honest search: you want to hear the result before reaching for a card. The problem is not that a tool is free, it is that the word covers very different realities from one provider to the next, and the difference only shows once you are committed. Here are the four things to check behind the word, then the exact breakdown of our own trial, figures included, without rounding them in the direction that suits us.
The four things "free" can hide
The quota. Free almost always means "free up to a certain volume". The right question is: how many characters, over what period, and what happens when the quota runs out? A quota that refills each month is not the same as a one-off credit that empties once and for all.
The voice watermark. Some free trials return a deliberately degraded voice, or embed an audio signal, to stop you using the audio in production. That is a defensible choice, but you need to know about it: you are then judging a demo, not the product.
The usage rights. Can you publish the audio produced during the trial? Many free offers allow listening but forbid commercial use. Voicing an article from your site with a trial that bans distribution means producing a file you have no right to put online.
The data sent. A free tool is still a tool that receives your text. Where is it processed, and is it kept? A price of zero does not remove the question, it makes it more important.
The exact breakdown of our trial
Here is what WeDispatch's free account gives, as it is set today. We spell it out because that is exactly the promise of the French text to speech page: say what the tool does and what it does not, without using sheer volume as an argument.
The quota: 5 credits per month, that is 5,000 characters. That is roughly two average-length articles, or a handful of shorter ones. It is not a round number inflated for the storefront: it is a small test amount, meant to hear the result on your own texts, not to run a site. A single article is capped at 5 credits on the trial too, that is 5,000 characters (against 100,000 characters on the volume plan).
The card: none. The account is created with no payment method. When the quota is reached, generation stops and waits for your decision. Nothing fires without your knowledge, because there is nothing set up to fire it.
The voices: two, one female and one male, per language. The trial does not open the full catalogue (more than a hundred and fifty voices), it gives you two to listen to. That is a call we made in this precise direction: fewer trial voices than paid accounts get, not the other way round. It is worth stating, because it is a real limit.
No watermark, no degraded voice. The trial reads with the same engine as the paid plans. You hear the whole product on those two voices: text highlights as it reads, subtitles line up, the position of each word is returned. The demo is not cut down, because a cut-down demo gets judged on what it lacks.
Usage rights: hear, not exploit. This is the most important no, and we state it plainly. The free trial is there to hear the result on your articles, not to run a site in production without paying. The advanced features (audio summary, white label, voice cloning, targeted correction of a passage, audio quotes) are not open on the free account. On the other hand, the podcast feed and the embeddable pages do stay free: they are announced as such, and integrations already run on accounts that do not pay for that piece.
The data: preparation in Europe. Text preparation, the stage that sees your whole article, happens in the European Union, trial included. Voice synthesis is not European yet: we do not hide it, and the Security page details the full chain. Here too, a price of zero changes nothing about that answer.
What the trial is meant to tell you
A well-built free trial answers a single question: does this tool read your texts correctly? Not a demo text, yours, with their proper nouns, figures and acronyms. Five credits (five thousand characters) are plenty to decide, as long as you pick your two worst paragraphs rather than your finest column.
If the result suits you, the next question is not "how much is a million characters" but "how many articles a month". Our piece on how much an article's audio version costs sets out that per-article reasoning, regenerations included. Moving to a paid plan then opens the full voice catalogue and the volume you need, without changing the engine you will already have heard on the trial.
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