Cartesia's Sonic 3.6 takes the #1 spot on both the Provider Voice and Controlled Voice Artificial Analysis Speech Arena leaderboards, surpassing Speechify AI's Simba 3.2 and Alibaba's Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS-Plus, with Sonic 3.5 holding #2 on Controlled Voice

Sonic 3.6 is the latest TTS model from @cartesia, supporting 40+ languages including English, Hindi, Spanish, French, German and Japanese. In the TTS Arena, the model has been preferred by voters and has demonstrated natural speech and adaptive pacing across conversations.

Key takeaways:

➤ Controlled Voice: Sonic 3.6 takes #1 on the Controlled Voice Arena with an Elo of 1,144 (+18/-18) across 1,339 appearances, ahead of Cartesia's own Sonic 3.5 at 1,099 and ElevenLabs' Eleven v3 at 1,060

➤ Provider Voice: Sonic 3.6 also takes #1 on the Provider Voice Arena with an Elo score of 1,286 (+19/-19) based on 1,300 arena appearances, placing it ahead of Simba 3.2 at 1,238 and Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS-Plus at 1,237

➤ Pricing: At $49 per 1M characters via the Cartesia platform, Sonic 3.6 is the most expensive of the top three models on quality, roughly 5x Speechify AI's Simba 3.2 at $10 and nearly double Alibaba's Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS-Plus at $27.59, though still half the price of ElevenLabs' Eleven v3 at $100

➤ Speed: Sonic 3.6 processes 136.1 characters per second of generation time, compared to 46.7 for ElevenLabs' Eleven v3 and 24.2 for Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS