My goal is to build a practical, budget-friendly workflow that turns written text into natural-sounding speech and can accurately clone voices for multiple languages. At this stage I need two things in one streamlined engagement: solid advice on the most affordable yet high-quality API or SDK, and the code that wires it into my existing stack. The core features must cover: • Text-to-speech that sounds lifelike in English, Spanish, Mandarin and room to add more. • Voice cloning that captures tone, pacing and timbre closely enough for content production and support scenarios. • Simple REST or gRPC endpoints so I can trigger synthesis from Python or JavaScript with low latency. Deliverables I’d like to receive: 1. A short comparison and final recommendation of the best-value API (e.g., ElevenLabs, Azure Neural TTS, Google Cloud, or any other you trust). 2. Clean integration code (sample scripts or small service) plus a README showing how to pass text, pick a language/voice, and retrieve the audio file. 3. Demonstration clips proving clarity and accuracy for at least the three languages above. 4. Guidance on pricing tiers and any tricks to keep monthly costs down. Acceptance criteria • Output audio must exceed 22 kHz, <1 s initial latency. • Cloned voice similarity rated ≥85 % by a freely available similarity metric or AB test. • Code runs locally with environment variables for keys, no hard-coded secrets. If this matches your expertise in speech synthesis APIs, I’m ready to move forward quickly and review your proposed approach.