HeyGen Voice debuts at No. 1 on Artificial Analysis

HeyGen launched HeyGen Voice on October 9, its first voice model built in-house, and said the model debuted at No. 1 on Artificial Analysis' voice leaderboard on the day it shipped.

The company announced the launch in a press release, calling the ranking "independent proof that you don't have to trade authenticity for quality," in a quote from chief technology officer Rong Yan. Artificial Analysis is a third-party benchmarking firm; HeyGen's claim rests on its own reading of that leaderboard, and the ranking is not a SLOP TV test.

HeyGen Voice is free inside the HeyGen platform and API. A separate paid tier, HeyGen Professional Voice Clone, costs $99 a month and is trained on 30 minutes to three hours of the voice owner's speech, which HeyGen says it collects with the owner's explicit consent.

The model is built to keep emphasis, emotion and pacing rather than flattening them, which is the failure HeyGen names as the reason most AI voices lose interest right away. HeyGen says voice now sits inside the same stack as its Avatar V model, so a creator's face and voice come from one vendor instead of two.

For newcomers, HeyGen is a Los Angeles company that makes talking-avatar video from a script, and it has been shipping steadily this year: it launched a daily AI avatar series with real-estate presenter Ryan Serhant, a story SLOP TV covered on October 10. Voice is the piece it had been renting from other vendors.

The company also released a survey of more than 1,000 small business owners in its user base, in which 71.6% said they had recorded a video for their business and then decided not to post it. HeyGen frames the voice model as a fix for the confidence and production-quality gap behind that number, a claim that is the company's own and not an outside finding.

For creators, the practical question is whether an in-house voice at the top of a public leaderboard beats the specialist voice tools they already license. The clone tier's $99 monthly price and its 30-minute minimum of source audio are the two numbers to weigh against what those tools charge.

HeyGen Voice is available now in the HeyGen platform and API; the Professional Voice Clone add-on costs $99 a month.