Is Nicola free to use?

Yes. Nicola runs on the free tier: 5,000 characters a day with no account, 10,000 with a free one, downloadable as MP3 or WAV and licensed for commercial use. No card, no trial period.

Does Nicola sound like a native Italian speaker?

Nicola was trained on Italian rather than being an English voice reading Italian text, so stress, vowel length and sentence melody follow Italian rather than English. It is a synthetic voice and not a recording of a person, but the accent and rhythm are Italian — which is the part that gives foreign-voice audio away.

Can I use Nicola commercially?

Yes. Every tier including the free one carries a commercial licence, so monetised YouTube videos, TikToks, ads, podcasts and paid client work are all covered. You own the audio you generate. The one thing not permitted is passing generated speech off as a specific real person.

Can Nicola read long text?

Yes. This engine takes up to 5,000 characters in one request; anything longer is split at sentence boundaries, generated in order, and joined into a single file you download once. The split falls between sentences, so it is not audible.

How do I use Nicola in a video?

Generate the audio, download the MP3, and import it as an audio track — CapCut, Premiere, DaVinci and Descript all take one directly. Because it is a file rather than a live effect, the same take can be reused across cuts, and re-editing your video never re-renders the voice.

Do I need an account to use Nicola?

No. Nicola generates and downloads without signing in. An account doubles the daily allowance and saves your generations to a history, but it is not a gate on the voice itself.

Nicola — AI male Voice | Speech Generation

Examples

Hear Nicola on real scripts

Each clip below was generated with a free-tier voice on the script shown. Play one to hear how this kind of writing lands, or load the script into the generator above and hear Nicola read it.

Course lesson

Module opener that tells learners what they will be able to do.

“By the end of this lesson you'll be able to read a balance sheet and say, in one sentence, whether the company can pay its bills next month. We'll use one real example throughout, and you'll do the last one yourself before we check it together.”

Read by Emma · British, calm

Lesson recap

Closes a module by naming the three things worth remembering.

“Three things to take with you. Assets minus liabilities is equity, and that relationship never breaks. Profit is an opinion; cash is a fact. And a company can be profitable and still run out of money — which is what the next lesson is entirely about.”

Read by Poppy · British, bright

Phone greeting

IVR or voicemail line — the classic use for a consistent voice.

“Thank you for calling Northgate Supply. Our team is available Monday to Friday, eight until six. For an existing order, press one. For everything else, stay on the line and someone will be with you shortly.”

Read by Emma · British, calm

About the Nicola voice

Nicola is the steadier of the two Italian voices — a little lower, a little more even, and better suited to material that continues for a while. Where Sara has more lift, Nicola holds a line, which makes him the safer choice for anything longer than a minute.

Why a Italian voice, and not an English one

Nicola was trained on Italian, which matters more than it sounds like it should. An English voice pointed at Italian text will get the individual sounds roughly right and the rhythm completely wrong — stress in the wrong places, vowel lengths flattened, the melody of the sentence replaced with an English one. It is intelligible and it is immediately, unmistakably foreign.

Italian is also read here by Sara — worth previewing side by side, since the difference between two voices in the same language is usually more useful than the difference between two languages.

The engine behind this voice

Kokoro is an 82-million-parameter open-weights model under Apache-2.0 — the cheapest capable engine available by roughly an order of magnitude, which is what makes this tier free at all. It takes up to 5,000 characters per request, adjusts from 0.75× to 1.5×, and returns MP3 or WAV. Longer text is split at sentence boundaries and joined back into one file.

More about Kokoro TTS →

What Nicola costs

Nothing. Nicola is a free-tier voice: 5,000 characters a day without an account, 10,000 with a free one, and no credit card at any point. Audio downloads as MP3 or WAV and carries a commercial licence, so monetised videos and client work are both fine.

The daily allowance is stated plainly here because several sites in this category advertise "unlimited" and enforce a monthly cap. What is written above is what the server enforces.

Best for

What Nicola is good for

Longer Italian narration: explainers, course modules, audio guides
Italian corporate and product video, where enthusiasm would read as sales
Announcements and information audio in Italian
Male-voice Italian projects needing a consistent read across many files

Limits

Where Nicola is the wrong choice

Same C grade as Sara, and steadiness turns into flatness on material that needs any lift at all. He is the right choice for a five-minute explainer and the wrong one for a thirty-second promo.

How it works

How to use Nicola

1
Paste your text
Type or paste the script you want Nicola to read. Longer text is split into parts automatically and joined back into one file.
2
Preview Nicola
The generator above already has this voice selected. Play the sample, or generate a sentence of your own text to hear it on your writing.
3
Generate and download
Audio comes back in seconds as MP3 or WAV, with a commercial licence on every tier — including the free one.

Questions

Frequently asked

Keep going

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