Ukrainian text to speech by API - natural voices, MP3 and subtitles

Good Ukrainian voices are rare in text-to-speech APIs: many offer none, and open voices often put the stress on the
wrong syllable. This guide shows one API call that turns Ukrainian text into an MP3 with subtitles, with a sample
you can play right here. The run below is from 7 November 2026.

Disclosure: I built the tool used here, Text to Speech on Apify. The
voices run inside it (Piper neural models), so no other service and no
key of yours is involved. The source code is open:
AndriyVK/-apify-document-tools.

Listen first

▶ Listen to the MP3 sample

Voice uk_UA-tetiana-high, speed 1.12, MP3. This is the file exactly as the API returned it, not edited.

The call

from apify_client import ApifyClient client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>") run = client.actor("ai_admin/text-to-speech").call(run_input={ "text": "Добрий день! Це український голос, створений нейромережею.\n\n" "Він читає статті, документи та субтитри природно і без акценту.", "voice": "uk_UA-tetiana-high", # or uk_UA-mykyta-high, uk_UA-oleksa-high  "speed": 1.12, "format": "mp3", # mp3, wav or ogg  "subtitles": True, # SRT and VTT, free }) item = next(client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items()) print(item["durationSeconds"], item["audioUrl"], item["srtUrl"])

Instead of text you can pass sources: links to TXT, Markdown, HTML, DOCX or PDF files (with a text layer), one
audio file each.

The real output

voice: uk_UA-tetiana-high characters: 120 sentences: 3 durationSeconds: 10.59

And the subtitles that came with it - one cue per sentence, timed to the audio:

1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:01,068 Добрий день! 2 00:00:01,291 --> 00:00:04,240 Це український голос, створений нейромережею. 3 00:00:04,865 --> 00:00:10,589 Він читає статті, документи та субтитри природно і без акценту.

The whole run took 30 seconds, most of it the container start. As a rule of thumb, 750-900 characters make one minute
of speech.

Price

Per started minute of audio: $40 per 1,000 minutes with the high voices (4 cents a minute) and $10 per 1,000
with medium/low voices. All three Ukrainian voices are high. The sample above is one started minute - 4 cents.
Subtitles are free.

Limits

Numbers, abbreviations and foreign words are read by the voice's rules and may sound odd: write «двадцять п'ять» or check how «25» sounds.
Scanned PDFs without a text layer are not read - run them through OCR first (see Ukrainian scans to Markdown).
It is a synthetic voice. For an audiobook it is fine for drafts and accessibility; a professional narrator is still better for a final release.