Humanness Index™ · Provider
Smallest.ai is a research-first voice AI company whose Waves platform spans the Lightning text to speech line, the Pulse speech to text models, and the Atoms voice agent stack.
Standings as of Jul 28, 2026, 02:12 UTC
| Rank | Model | Humanness | Latency | Languages | Price / 1M chars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #17 | Lightning v3.1 | 45 | 420 ms | 12 | $15 |
Smallest.ai is a research-first voice AI company whose Waves platform spans the Lightning text to speech line, the Pulse speech to text models, and the Atoms voice agent stack. Its March 2026 Lightning V3 launch claimed blind listener wins over OpenAI, Cartesia, and ElevenLabs on the EmergentTTS benchmark, positioning the family squarely at conversational agents.
Sources: smallest.ai, docs.smallest.ai
One Lightning model sits on the Index, served through the unified Waves API with HTTP, SSE, and WebSocket access and instant voice cloning from a 5 to 15 second sample via API or console. Pay-as-you-go usage bills about $0.0145 per 1,000 characters, a $14.50 per 1M effective rate, with custom enterprise and on premises options above it.
Sources: smallest.ai, docs.smallest.ai
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