Farsi text to speech: why Google has no built-in voice, and the alternatives

Sanctions are less of a barrier than they seem

US sanctions on Iran are administered by OFAC, the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control. Since 2022, though, US rules have expressly allowed American firms to offer communications software and services to people in Iran. The Treasury's description of that licence, General License D-2, names "automated translation" among the covered tools (US Treasury, September 2022), and OFAC moved the licence into regulation 31 CFR 560.540 in May 2024 (OFAC).

The clearest evidence is that other American companies already sell Persian voices. Microsoft offers two, and ElevenLabs lists Persian for its newest models, so a US vendor can plainly offer one. This is a summary of official guidance, not legal advice, and a company selling into Iran would still need its own sanctions review.

Market size and training data

The likelier explanation is a mix of priority and difficulty. Iran is hard to sell to, so a Persian voice earns little from the country where most speakers live, and the diaspora is large but scattered. Amazon Polly, another major cloud voice service, has no Persian voice either.

Persian is also harder to voice well than its alphabet suggests. Short vowels are usually not written, and neither is the ezafe, a linking vowel that joins a noun to the word describing it. An engine has to infer both from context, so it needs more training data to read text correctly. One reply on r/farsi noted that things had improved with Gemini, which fits a pattern: Persian is arriving through large general-purpose models rather than dedicated voices.

Cloud voices

Microsoft Azure has two Persian voices, fa-IR-DilaraNeural (female) and fa-IR-FaridNeural (male) (Azure language support). Azure notes that phonemes and custom lexicons are not supported for them, so you cannot correct a mispronounced word with a pronunciation entry; you rewrite the text instead. Many web tools resell these same two voices under their own brand, so expect to hear Dilara and Farid on more than one site.

ElevenLabs lists Persian for its Eleven v3 and v4 models, but not for its older Multilingual v2 or Flash v2.5 models. All of these services have HTTP APIs, so calling them from Python takes only the requests library and an API key.

Open models you can run offline

For offline use, the Piper project publishes five Persian voices (amir, ganji, ganji_adabi, gyro and reza_ibrahim), all at medium quality and each with one speaker (Piper voice list). Piper runs on modest hardware, including a laptop CPU, and each voice's model card states its licence, which you should check before commercial use.

Meta's MMS Persian model, facebook/mms-tts-fas, also runs locally from Python, but it is licensed CC-BY-NC 4.0, which rules out commercial use (model card). On a Chrome desktop, a free extension built on the open-source eSpeak engine reads Persian offline, though eSpeak voices sound clearly synthetic.

Cloning a Persian voice

Voice cloning (کلون صدا فارسی) builds a synthetic voice from a short recording of a real speaker. The clone keeps the accent of whoever recorded the sample: a Tehran speaker's sample gives a Tehran accent, and your own English-accented sample gives English-accented Persian. Clone only your own voice, or someone else's with their clear consent. Our guide to how accent carries over in cross-language voice cloning explains why.

Sonex Labs sells one of the options, so weigh this paragraph with that in mind. Pāṇini TTS reads Persian in its own script, in whichever register you write, and clones a voice from a 10-second recording through the same text to speech API. None of its platform voices was recorded by a Persian speaker: the samples on this page are read by Nour, a Modern Standard Arabic voice, so they carry her accent. The Persian text to speech page has more samples, and the free allowance is 10,000 characters and one voice clone.

Spoken and written Persian

Spoken and written Persian are far apart. می‌خواهم (I want) is said می‌خوام, and است (is) usually shrinks to a short -e at the end of a word. A reminder written in formal Persian therefore sounds like a government letter read aloud, which suits a news bulletin but not a phone call or a casual video.

Two small habits help any engine. Keep the half-space (the zero-width non-joiner) in forms like می‌خوام, so the prefix stays attached without merging letters. Replace the Arabic letters ي and ك, which some keyboards produce, with Persian ی and ک. The same problem of unwritten vowels affects Hebrew and Arabic, as our guides to Hebrew text to speech without niqqud and Arabic diacritics in TTS describe.

Rials, tomans and the coming redenomination

Money is where scripts go wrong most. Prices are written in rials, Iran's official currency, but people talk in tomans, an unofficial unit equal to 10 rials (Al Jazeera, August 2026). So 1,500,000 rials and 150,000 tomans are the same amount, and a voice will say whichever number and unit you give it. Inflation makes the numbers long: Al Jazeera reported in August 2026 that one US dollar cost 2 million rials.

A change is planned but has not started. In October 2025 Iran's parliament passed a bill to cut four zeros from the rial. Under it, 10,000 current rials become one new rial divided into 100 qerans, and old and new money can circulate together for up to three years (Tehran Times, 5 October 2025). In February 2026 the central bank's board approved draft rules that still needed cabinet approval. Until a start date is announced, write amounts in the units your listeners use today, and say which unit you mean.

Dari and other varieties

Dari, the Persian of Afghanistan, uses the same script, so most Persian voices will read it. Vocabulary and pronunciation differ, though, and a voice trained on Iranian Persian sounds Iranian. Test sentences with the words your Afghan listeners actually use, or clone a consenting Dari speaker.