Let’s start with what most peo­ple are prob­a­bly look­ing for: high-qual­i­­ty, real­is­tic voice clones for con­tent cre­ation.
For Top-Tier Real­ism: Eleven­Labs
If you just want the most human-sound­ing voice pos­si­ble, Eleven­Labs is hard to beat. Their mod­els are known for cap­tur­ing the lit­tle details in speech—like tone and emo­tion­al inflection—that make a voice sound real. This makes it a sol­id choice for things like nar­rat­ing audio­books or cre­at­ing pro­fes­­sion­al-sound­ing video voiceovers where qual­i­ty is the main con­cern.
Get­ting start­ed is straight­for­ward. You nav­i­gate to the "Instant Voice Cloning" sec­tion, upload or record some audio, name your voice, and save it. For the basic "Instant Voice Clone," you only need about a minute of clean audio, but giv­ing it a few min­utes will get you a bet­ter result. They also have a "Pro­fes­sion­al Voice Cloning" option which requires more audio—at least 30 minutes—but pro­duces a much more accu­rate repli­ca of your voice. This is the one you'd want for seri­ous projects.
But, it's not per­fect. The free plan doesn't include voice cloning, so you have to pay to use this fea­ture. The pric­ing is tiered, so how much you pay depends on how much audio you need to gen­er­ate. Plans can range from a few dol­lars a month for hob­by­ists to much more for heavy users.
For Edit­ing and Work­flow: Descript
Descript is a dif­fer­ent kind of tool. It's a full-fledged audio and video edi­tor that hap­pens to have a very use­ful voice cloning fea­ture called "Over­dub". This is my go-to for pod­cast edit­ing. The main advan­tage here is the work­flow. Descript tran­scribes your audio, and then you can edit the audio by just edit­ing the text. If you said the wrong word, you can lit­er­al­ly just type in the cor­rect word, and Over­dub will gen­er­ate it in your cloned voice, seam­less­ly patch­ing it into the record­ing. It's incred­i­bly effi­cient for mak­ing cor­rec­tions with­out hav­ing to re-record entire sec­tions.
To cre­ate your voice clone, you record your­self read­ing a script they pro­vide. Once it’s set up, using it is as sim­ple as typ­ing. While the voice qual­i­ty is good, some users have not­ed it can sound a bit more robot­ic than Eleven­Labs and offers less direct con­trol over the emo­tion­al out­put. The workaround is to cre­ate mul­ti­ple clones with dif­fer­ent deliv­ery styles, which is a bit of a has­sle.
Descript also has a free plan, but the Over­dub fea­ture is lim­it­ed. Paid plans start at a rea­son­able month­ly price and offer more usage.
For Cus­tomiza­tion and Devel­op­ers: Resem­ble.ai
Resemble.ai is aimed more at devel­op­ers and busi­ness­es that need a lot of flex­i­bil­i­ty and con­trol. It offers fea­tures like real-time speech-to-speech con­ver­sion, which lets you trans­form your voice into anoth­er AI voice live. It also has an API that lets devel­op­ers build the voice tech­nol­o­gy direct­ly into their own appli­ca­tions.
One of its key fea­tures is the abil­i­ty to adjust the emo­tion­al out­put of the cloned voice with a lot of pre­ci­sion. You can cre­ate a voice and then make it sound hap­py, sad, or angry. For devel­op­ers build­ing inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ences or game char­ac­ters, this is a big deal.
The pric­ing for Resemble.ai is more com­plex and gen­er­al­ly high­er than tools aimed at indi­vid­ual cre­ators, with dif­fer­ent tiers depend­ing on your usage and needs. They offer pay-as-you-go options as well as month­ly sub­scrip­tions that can get expen­sive for large-scale use.
A Sol­id, User-Friend­­ly Option: Play.ht
Play.ht is anoth­er strong con­tender, espe­cial­ly for those who need a wide vari­ety of voic­es and lan­guages. It's known for hav­ing a huge library of stock AI voic­es, but its voice cloning is also quite good. The plat­form is very easy to use; you paste your text, pick your cloned voice, make some minor adjust­ments to speed or tone, and gen­er­ate the audio.
Play.ht offers both "Instant" and "High Fideli­ty" cloning options, sim­i­lar to oth­er plat­forms. The instant clone requires very lit­tle audio, while the high-fideli­­ty ver­sion needs more data for a bet­ter result. Users have found the voice qual­i­ty to be very real­is­tic, often mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to tell the dif­fer­ence between the AI and a human.
How­ev­er, some peo­ple find that the voic­es can sound a bit neu­tral and lack the emo­tion­al range of some­thing like Eleven­Labs. The free plan is quite lim­it­ed, and to get access to the best cloning fea­tures, you need to sub­scribe to one of their paid plans, which start at a com­pet­i­tive price point.
What About Free Options?
Find­ing a tru­ly free, high-qual­i­­ty voice cloning tool is tough. Many ser­vices adver­tise free cloning, but there's often a catch. For exam­ple, they might let you cre­ate the clone for free, but then you have to pay to actu­al­ly gen­er­ate any audio with it. Voclon­er is one option that offers a free tier with a dai­ly char­ac­ter lim­it, mak­ing it pos­si­ble to try out the tech­nol­o­gy with­out pay­ing. How­ev­er, for any seri­ous or con­sis­tent use, you'll almost cer­tain­ly need to move to a paid plan on one of the major plat­forms.
There are also open-source projects avail­able if you have the tech­ni­cal skills to use them. Tools like Open­Voice, devel­oped by researchers from places like MIT, allow you to run the voice cloning mod­els your­self. This gives you com­plete con­trol but requires a sig­nif­i­cant amount of set­up and isn't a sim­ple, user-friend­­ly soft­ware solu­tion.
How to Get a Good Clone
Regard­less of which soft­ware you choose, the qual­i­ty of your final cloned voice depends heav­i­ly on the qual­i­ty of the audio you pro­vide it. Here are a few things that actu­al­ly mat­ter:

Use a good micro­phone. Your phone's built-in mic might work in a pinch, but a decent exter­nal micro­phone will make a huge dif­fer­ence. You don't need a pro­fes­sion­al stu­dio set­up, but bet­ter input means bet­ter out­put.
Record in a qui­et space. Back­ground noise, echoes, and reverb will all be picked up by the AI and can make your clone sound mud­dy or dis­tort­ed. A small room with lots of soft sur­faces (like a clos­et) is bet­ter than a large, emp­ty room.
Be con­sis­tent. The AI learns from what you give it. If your sam­ple audio has wide fluc­tu­a­tions in vol­ume, pitch, or ener­gy, the result­ing clone can be unpre­dictable. Try to main­tain a con­sis­tent tone and pace through­out your record­ing.
Pro­vide enough audio. While some tools can gen­er­ate a clone from just a few sec­onds of audio, more is always bet­ter. For a real­ly accu­rate clone, you'll want to pro­vide at least sev­er­al min­utes, and for pro­fes­sion­al qual­i­ty, 30 min­utes or more is often rec­om­mend­ed.

Ulti­mate­ly, there isn't a sin­gle "best" soft­ware. Eleven­Labs is fan­tas­tic for pure real­ism. Descript is the most effi­cient tool for pod­cast­ers and edi­tors. Resemble.ai is for devel­op­ers who need deep con­trol. And Play.ht is a great all-arounder that's easy to use. The best approach is to iden­ti­fy exact­ly what you need the voice clone for and then try out the free tri­als or starter plans for the tools that seem like the best fit.