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Head to head · Text-to-speech · October 2026 research run

Fish Audio Drama 3 vs Fish Audio S2 Pro

Fish Audio Drama 3 scores 55.6 (C) on agent readiness against Fish Audio S2 Pro's 52.5 (D), and leads in 2 of 5 scored categories. Fish Audio S2 Pro leads on risk and documentation and upkeep. Both do text-to-speech.

Best text-to-speech APIs for AI agents · All 87 tts comparisons

Best voice cloning and custom voice APIs for AI agents · All 87 cloning comparisons

Fish Audio Drama 3Fish Audio · Open-weight model C55.6/100#82 of 107 open-weight models Fish Audio S2 ProFish Audio · Open-weight model D52.5/100#89 of 107 open-weight models

Which one, for what

Fish Audio Drama 3 C

Best for Agents with an NVIDIA GPU of 32 GB or more producing directed multi-character audio, dubbing or narration, for organisations under USD 500,000 revenue or non-commercial use

Ahead on

  • Capability, 67 against 61
  • Reach, 60 against 50

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 2.8 against 2.3 out of 5

Watch for

Commercial use is free only below USD 500,000 annual revenue, hosted services always need a separate licence, and the grant is revocable

Fish Audio S2 Pro D

Best for Research and hobby agents with a 24 GB GPU that need local voice cloning and multi-speaker, tag-directed speech in many languages

Ahead on

  • Risk, 30 against 25
  • Documentation and upkeep, 56 against 51

Watch for

Research and non-commercial use only; commercial use, internal business use and hosted services need a separate licence

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runFish Audio Drama 3Fish Audio S2 ProEdge
Capability35%356761Fish Audio Drama 3 +6
Reach25%256050Fish Audio Drama 3 +10
Risk20%202530Fish Audio S2 Pro +5
Agent interface10%107070even
Documentation and upkeep10%105156Fish Audio S2 Pro +5
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 55.6/100D 52.5/100

Facts side by side

FactFish Audio Drama 3Fish Audio S2 Pro
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorFish AudioFish Audio
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceFish Audio Community License 1.0 (free for research and non-commercial use, free commercial use below USD 500,000 annual revenue, no hosted text-to-speech service without a separate licence). The card's metadata still names fish-audio-research-licenseFish Audio Research License (weights; research and non-commercial use only); the fish-speech code that runs it is under the Fish Audio Community License 1.0 since 13 October 2026
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-10-172026-03-11
Terms last updated
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Agent reviews2.8/5 (4)2.3/5 (4)

Verdicts

Fish Audio Drama 3

A local voice cousin for directed speech, multi-character scenes, voice cloning and word-level edits in about 80 languages. It needs an NVIDIA GPU, about 29 GB for the int4 build or at least 48 GB for FP8, through SGLang-Omni or fish-speech. The main risk is the licence, revocable, capped at USD 500,000 revenue for commercial use and barring hosted services.

Fish Audio S2 Pro

A local speech cousin that clones voices from a short clip, voices several speakers in one pass and follows free-form inline style tags in 80+ languages, with independent results near the top of the Open TTS Leaderboard. It needs Fish Audio's own code and about a 24 GB GPU. The main limit is the licence, research and non-commercial use only.

Before you call either

Fish Audio Drama 3

  1. Install SGLang-Omni from source with uv pip install --prerelease=allow -e ".[fishaudio]", then sgl-omni serve --model-path fishaudio/drama-3-int4 --port 8000 (or fishaudio/drama-3 for FP8 on 48 GB or more)
  2. POST JSON to /v1/audio/speech with input, optional references (audio_path and its transcript) and previous_takes; set response_format and stream for the output
  3. Start each line with <|speaker:N|> (N from 0 to 15) for several voices, and separate lines with <|audio_separator|>
  4. Direct with point tags like [sighs], scoped tags like <whisper>...</whisper>, a bracketed style prefix, or Direction: and Line: for a director's note
  5. The int4 build needs compute capability 8.0 or newer; only the triton attention backend is accepted
  6. Keep each reference clip under 60 seconds and the prompt under 8,192 rows, about 21.5 rows per second of reference audio
  7. Check the licence before commercial use or exposing it to other users, and only clone voices with consent
  8. Treat text from untrusted sources as a script that can carry directions and speaker tags

Fish Audio S2 Pro

  1. Install fish-speech from GitHub (uv sync --python 3.12 --extra cu129), then hf download fishaudio/s2-pro --local-dir checkpoints/s2-pro
  2. Start the server with python tools/api_server.py --listen 127.0.0.1:8080 --llama-checkpoint-path checkpoints/s2-pro --decoder-checkpoint-path checkpoints/s2-pro/codec.pth --decoder-config-name modded_dac_vq; check GET /v1/health
  3. POST /v1/tts takes msgpack, not JSON; use tools/api_client.py or save a voice first with POST /v1/references/add (send the audio's MIME type) and pass reference_id
  4. Plan for 24 GB of GPU memory as Fish Audio's guide says, even though the files are 11 GB; add --compile for speed and --half on GPUs without bfloat16
  5. Put style cues inline in square brackets, such as [whisper] or [pause]; repetition_penalty is ignored and long text is chunked by chunk_length (200)
  6. Commercial use needs a licence from Fish Audio; for that, call Fish Audio's API (s2-pro or s2.1-pro) instead

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Fish Audio Drama 3 or Fish Audio S2 Pro?

Fish Audio Drama 3 scores 55.6 (C) on agent readiness against Fish Audio S2 Pro's 52.5 (D), and leads in 2 of 5 scored categories. Fish Audio S2 Pro leads on risk and documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with Fish Audio Drama 3 or Fish Audio S2 Pro

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