Text to speech
Arabic text to speech for audiobooks, chapter by chapter
Paste your chapters and get Arabic narration in a single narrator's voice from the first page to the last. For authors, small publishers and self-publishers who want an audio edition of a finished book without booking a studio or contracting a narrator for weeks.
- Modern Standard Arabic + 18 dialects
- 100 library voices
- Live demo, no sign-up
Free plan: 500͏ credits a month, MP3, personal use. Commercial rights from Starter.
See the workflowThe demo reads up to 200 characters with no sign-up. Paste one of the scripts below to hear it.
Hear it yourself
Passages for auditioning a narrator
Try voices on these before pasting your own book; between them they cover narration, dialogue and explanation. The first one fits the demo at the top of the page.
Opening of a novel
Modern Standard Arabicلم يكن في القرية من يعرف من أين جاء الغريب. وصل مع أول المطر، يحمل حقيبة جلدية قديمة، وسأل عن بيت واحد: بيت الحاجّة سلمى عند طرف الوادي.
What it says: No one in the village knew where the stranger had come from. He arrived with the first rain, carrying an old leather bag, and asked for one house only: Hajja Salma's, at the edge of the valley.
Colloquial dialogue inside a novel
Egyptian Arabicبصّت له وقالت: إنت فاكر إني مش عارفة؟ أنا عارفة كل حاجة من زمان، بس كنت مستنية تيجي تقول لي بنفسك. دلوقتي اقعد واحكي لي من الأول.
What it says: She looked at him and said: You think I don't know? I've known everything for a long time; I was just waiting for you to come and tell me yourself. Now sit down and tell me from the beginning.
Passage from a non-fiction book
Modern Standard Arabicالعادة لا تتغيّر بقرار واحد، بل بتكرار صغير كل يوم. في هذا الفصل نتتبع ثلاث خطوات: أن تحدّد الإشارة التي تسبق العادة، ثم تستبدل الفعل، ثم تمنح نفسك مكافأة فورية.
What it says: A habit does not change with a single decision, but with a small repetition every day. In this chapter we follow three steps: identify the cue that comes before the habit, replace the action, then give yourself an immediate reward.
Every recording is real Vocla output in a public library voice, published unedited.
The problem
The book is written. The audio edition has been on hold for a year
Producing an audiobook the usual way is a project of its own: a narrator reading for many hours, a sound engineer, a proof-listener checking the audio against the text, then rounds of corrections.
A small publisher releasing ten titles a year cannot do that for each one, so it picks one or two and leaves the rest.
The self-published author tries reading the book aloud and finds out by chapter three that reading for hours on end is a different craft from writing. Breath runs short, the tone shifts from one session to the next, and a character's name comes out two different ways.
Arabic makes it harder because printed text carries no tashkeel. «عَلِمَ», «عُلِمَ» and «عَلَّمَ» are all written with the same letters, and only the person who wrote them knows how the names of characters and places are said. Any automated reading that gives you no way to control this will slip in places a listener notices at once.
Why Vocla
What makes Vocla a fit for book narration
One narrator who never tires
Choose a voice from the voice library and fix its settings, and chapter twenty comes out in the tone of chapter one. Return months later for a revised edition and the narrator is exactly as you left them.
Tashkeel that you review
Add tashkeel to a chapter in one click, then go through each change and accept or reject it. Where a word can be read more than one way, listen to the alternatives and pick the one you meant. The marks do not count toward your credits.
Character and place names remembered
Add the protagonist's name, the village and the term you invented to the pronunciation dictionary once before you begin, and each is read the same way in every chapter.
Up to 10,000 characters at a time
One generation holds about ten minutes of narration. Split a long chapter at scene breaks into two or three segments, then join the files in any audio editor.
Fix a page, not a chapter
If you find a mistake while listening, regenerate only the segment that contains it. Everything you generate stays in your history, so a chapter you finished a month ago is not lost.
How it works
From manuscript to chapter files
Step 1
Prepare the text for the ear
Copy the chapter from your file and paste it in; there is no PDF or Word import. Remove page numbers, footnotes and anything not meant to be read aloud, and write numbers and dates as words.
Step 2
Test the narrator on a difficult page
Pick a page with dialogue, description and names, and generate it in two or three voices. Listen on earphones while walking, which is how audiobooks are heard, then commit to one voice and note its settings.
Step 3
Build the book's dictionary
Collect names and rare words from the entire book and enter them in the pronunciation dictionary before generating chapter one, so you are not correcting the same name in twenty files.
Step 4
Generate chapter by chapter, listening with the text open
Split each chapter into segments of no more than 10,000 characters, ending at a paragraph break. Follow the text as you listen, mark every word that was read differently from what you intended, then fix its tashkeel and regenerate its segment.
Step 5
Name the files and check your publishing platform's terms
Download the files with ordered names such as 01-introduction and 02-chapter-one. Before uploading, read the terms of the platform you will publish on: some require specific audio specifications or have their own policy on AI-generated narration.
Listen to the voices
Voices that fit this job
Public voices from the library whose style suits this work. Play a sample or open a voice for details.
Text to speech in the matching dialects
Cost
What does a whole book cost?
Work it out from the character count of your manuscript, which any word processor shows: a thousand characters is about one spoken minute and uses between 800 and 1,200 credits depending on the model. A sixty-thousand-word book runs past three hundred thousand characters, so it is a project you spread over more than one month or cover with a credit top-up.
The Free plan gives 500͏ credits a month for personal use, which is suited to auditioning the narrator on pages from your book. Selling the audiobook, or releasing it under a publisher's name, needs commercial usage rights, which start with the Starter plan at $4.99 a month. For long books, the Professional plan gives 80,000 credits and the Business plan 350,000 credits a month.
Compare plansThe numbers
Quick maths
Worked example: a 60-minute script is about 48,000 to 72,000 credits.
- Free plan: 500͏ credits a month for text to speech, with MP3 downloads, for personal use only.
- Text to speech uses 800 to 1,200 credits per 1,000 characters, depending on the model. 1,000 characters is about one spoken minute, and tashkeel marks are never counted.
- Commercial usage rights and WAV export start with Starter: $4.99 a month with 5,000 credits.
Figures use the current plans and default credit rates. The exact cost is always shown in the app before you confirm.
Questions people ask
How do I turn a PDF book into an audiobook?
Vocla does not import PDF files directly. Open the file, copy the chapter text and paste it into text to speech, then clean out the page numbers, footnotes and broken line breaks that copying from a PDF leaves behind. After that, generate the audio segment by segment; each segment holds up to 10,000 characters.
Can I sell the audiobook I make?
Yes, if you generate it on the Starter plan or higher, which is where commercial usage rights begin. The Free plan is for personal use only. Check two things outside Vocla as well: that you hold the rights to the text itself, and that the platform you will sell on accepts AI-generated narration.
Does the voice read difficult words and names correctly?
It reads text without tashkeel well most of the time, but it can slip on a word that has more than one reading or on an unfamiliar name. The fix is in your hands: add tashkeel to the word, listen to its alternative readings and choose, or add it to the pronunciation dictionary. None of this replaces listening to every chapter before you publish.
Can I give the characters different voices?
For narration in one narrator's voice, text to speech is all you need, and that is the common style for audiobooks. If you want a voice per character in dialogue scenes, the text to dialogue tool puts several voices in one file; it is available on paid plans.
Can I narrate my book in my own voice?
Yes, through voice cloning, available from the Starter plan. You record one to two minutes of clear reading in a quiet place, the voice is ready in about a minute, and it then reads your chapters in your voice and accent. The cloned voice is private to your workspace, and you may only clone your own voice or one whose owner has given written permission.
Go deeper
- The tool: Text to speechTurn scripts into lifelike Arabic speech
- Plans and pricesWhat each plan includes, side by side
- Voice libraryPlay real samples by dialect
- How to Make an Arabic Audiobook with AI Narration: From Manuscript to Chapter FilesRead the guide
- How to Convert Long Text to Audio: Articles and Book Chapters Without Seams or Voice DriftRead the guide
- Arabic Text to Speech MP3 Download: How to Get Your File, and When You Need WAVRead the guide
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One consistent narrator for every lesson, updated whenever the content changes.
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- 500͏ free credits every month
- No card required
- Arabic and English interface