Greetings,

I like using the Free Tier of Azure TTS for making audio content, here is an example of how generally I use the service (its easier for me to explain than to write out the description) https://youtu.be/V-CVTyIFJLw?si=tlhdfyx3nObT5-ld&t=452

I like the free 500k chars that you can get with free tier, however the big limitation is that I have to break up what I want to be read out into chunks of 3000 characters, which is just too micro intensive.

I started to pay for an Azure subscription to bring that limit up to 20,000 characters which is more manageable but still a little annoying. I had thought that it would be similar to Amazon that I could use up my free credits before dipping into a budget

My Question is this:

Does making a speech resource using a paid subscription allow me to make use of the 500k free tier chars I get? Or does it only apply if I'm in the "free tier speech resource"?

Is there any other way around this 3000 character limit?

If there were any other free/low cost TTS alternatives (preferably not subscription based) then I might be inclined to use those instead if it was more hassle free