The lesson? Never use free text-to-speech online tools in a commercial project. Voiceverse lost its celebrity backer as a result. The creator of the voice, 15.ai, found out and brought the complaint to Twitter, the nation’s highest court of public shaming.

The issue? Voiceverse used a non-commercial TTS voice without permission, offering it for sale as an NFT. By the end of that month, Baker had pulled out of the deal and Voiceverse was making public apologies. In January 2022, Voiceverse was on top of the NFT world, having netted a powerful new partner in gaming voice superstar Troy Baker (that’s Joel from The Last of Us, among about a million other roles).

But before you go selling rights, you should probably make sure they’re yours to sell. The company combined TTS voices with NFT ownership: Buy the NFT and you get exclusive rights to a voice file. Just look at the benighted voice NFT provider, Voiceverse. The best text-to-speech online tools are fun to play with, but you wouldn’t want to use them for a commercial project.

First speech synthesizer online