Telenow
Text-to-speech (TTS)BYOK supported

Smallest.ai (Lightning) for AI voice agents

Smallest.ai (Lightning) is one of the voices you can run a Telenow AI voice agent on. Ultra-low-latency TTS — 225+ voices, 30+ languages incl. Indian. Give your agent a Smallest.ai (Lightning) voice for natural, streaming speech the caller can't tell from a human. Mix and match it with any LLM, STT, TTS and carrier — Telenow is component-level, so you're never locked in.

Last updated 2026-09-16

Smallest.ai (Lightning) voices

Streaming~130ms229 voices
Meher · HINDIAarini · HINDIAhan · HINDIAviraj · HINDIInaaya · HINDIKareena · HINDIMishka · HINDIReyansh · HINDIRhea · HINDISaira · HINDIVyom · HINDIZariya · HINDIZoravar · HINDIBarath · TAMILDinesh · TAMILEzhil · TAMILKavin · TAMILMalar · TAMILMathan · TAMILMurugan · TAMILNila · TAMILPrabhu · TAMILSakthi · TAMILTamilselvi · TAMILTamizh · TAMILBhaskar · TELUGUCharan · TELUGUGopal · TELUGUManohar · TELUGUNaveen · TELUGUSasank · TELUGUSravani · TELUGUSwathi · TELUGUBasava · KANNADAGowtham · KANNADAKishore · KANNADARakshith · KANNADARashmi · KANNADASahana · KANNADAShankar · KANNADA

Frequently asked questions

Can I use a Smallest.ai (Lightning) voice for my AI agent?+

Yes — pick a Smallest.ai (Lightning) voice in Telenow and your agent speaks with it on every call, streaming so there's no awkward pause.

What voices does Smallest.ai (Lightning) offer?+

Meher, Aarini, Ahan, Aviraj, Inaaya, Kareena, Mishka, and Reyansh, and more — choose by language, gender and style in the builder.

Does Smallest.ai (Lightning) stream speech in real time?+

Yes — Smallest.ai (Lightning) streams audio as it's generated, so the agent starts talking immediately instead of waiting for the whole sentence.

How much does Smallest.ai (Lightning) cost for a voice agent?+

You pay Smallest.ai (Lightning)'s usage at cost plus Telenow's transparent platform fee — billed per component (speech, model, telephony) and per minute, with new accounts getting free signup credit to try it.

Can I bring my own Smallest.ai (Lightning) API key?+

Yes. Telenow supports BYOK — paste your own Smallest.ai (Lightning) key to bill Smallest.ai (Lightning) usage to your account, or use the platform key and pay through Telenow.

Other text-to-speech (tts) options

Telenow TTS
Telenow in-house TTS — 22 Indian languages + English, voice cloning & design; μ-law 8k telephony, 24k HD on web calls.
ElevenLabs
Most natural prosody; great for branded voices.
OpenAI TTS
Predictable cost, 6 stock voices.
Cartesia
Lowest-latency streaming TTS (Sonic); near-realtime, μ-law 8k direct.
xAI (Grok)
Grok streaming TTS — expressive voices + your xAI voice clones, speech tags (laugh, sigh, pause) when expression is on; μ-law 8k telephony, 24k HD on web calls.
Soniox
Soniox real-time TTS — 60+ languages with one voice speaking them all (strong Hindi + code-switching), plus instant cross-lingual voice cloning; μ-law 8k telephony, 24k HD on web, gapless streaming.
Amazon Polly
AWS Polly neural voices — cheap, many languages, μ-law telephony output.
LMNT (Aurora)
Real-time multilingual TTS — low latency, 30+ languages, low cost.
Rime
Conversational US-English with accents/dialects; sub-100ms.
Sarvam (Indian languages)
Bulbul — Hindi + 10 Indian languages & Indian-English accents.
Hume (Octave)
Expressive, emotional TTS. Higher latency — warmth over speed.
UnrealSpeech
Low-cost streaming TTS — Kokoro voices across English (US/UK) & Hindi.
Google Gemini TTS
Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS — 30 voices that each speak 90+ languages, directed in plain English: you write the speaker, the scene and the accent (Indian, American, British…) and the same voice performs it. Inline tags ([whispers], [laughs], [excited]) steer delivery mid-sentence when expression is on. Synthesised a whole turn at a time so the performance never drifts between clauses; μ-law 8k telephony, 24k HD on web.
Custom TTS (bring your own endpoint)
Point at any streaming-HTTP TTS endpoint. Describe the request body + audio format once; we reframe the audio to telephony μ-law. MVP: streaming HTTP (mulaw / pcm16 / mp3).
$1.00 free credit on signup

Build a voice agent with Smallest.ai (Lightning)

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