Kugel 3.5 beats four leading TTS models on 8 of 9 tests. It gets short words wrong at half the rate of the next-best model, reads long numbers exactly right 97.1% of the time and supports IPA. 5.25 cents a minute. Not on Kugel? Three lines to production.
Hey everyone, we're back! This time it's Kugel 3.5, our new frontier TTS model.
Nobody wants to talk to a bot that sounds like one. Often the giveaway is small: a phone number read back wrong, or a "yes" that comes out mangled.
So we put Kugel 3.5 and four of the leading TTS models through the same 9 tests. Kugel 3.5 came first on 8: it gets short words wrong at half the rate of the next-best model (3% vs 6.1%) and reads long numbers exactly right 97.1% of the time, the highest of all five. It also costs 25% less than our previous model, 5.25 cents a minute. So, if your agents aren't running on Kugel yet, it's three lines to production.
Try it on your hardest inputs and tell us where it breaks.
Phone numbers are a good test case for speech tools: one wrong digit changes the whole message. Good to see that getting attention alongside how natural the voice sounds, Kajo.
About Kugel 3.5 on Product Hunt
“Text-to-speech that beats any other Model out there”
Kugel 3.5 launched on Product Hunt on October 14th, 2026 and earned 71 upvotes and 3 comments, placing #25 on the daily leaderboard. Kugel 3.5 beats four leading TTS models on 8 of 9 tests. It gets short words wrong at half the rate of the next-best model, reads long numbers exactly right 97.1% of the time and supports IPA. 5.25 cents a minute. Not on Kugel? Three lines to production.
Kugel 3.5 was featured in API (98.8k followers), Artificial Intelligence (481.3k followers) and Development (6.3k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 145.8k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Kugel 3.5?
Kugel 3.5 was hunted by Kajo Kratzenstein. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
Want to see how Kugel 3.5 stacked up against nearby launches in real time? Check out the live launch dashboard for upvote speed charts, proximity comparisons, and more analytics.
Kajo Kratzenstein