Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3) vs Grok Speech (STT + TTS APIs)
Which one should you pick? Here's the full breakdown.
Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3)
Tencent's Hy3 Preview launched 2026-04-23 -- 295B total / 21B active MoE, 256K context, open-sourced on HuggingFace under tencent/Hy3-preview. Cheapest frontier-class API at ~1.2 RMB per million input tokens. Integrated into Yuanbao, WeChat, QQ
Grok Speech (STT + TTS APIs)
xAI's standalone voice APIs -- launched 2026-04-17. Built on the stack that powers Grok Voice, Tesla vehicles, and Starlink customer support. $0.10/hr STT batch, $4.20 per 1M characters TTS, 25+ languages, word-level timestamps + speaker diarization
| Category | Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3) | Grok Speech (STT + TTS APIs) |
|---|---|---|
| Ease of Use | 7.0 | 7.0 |
| Output Quality | 8.0 | 8.5 |
| Value | 9.5 | 9.0 |
| Features | 8.0 | 8.0 |
| Overall | 8.1 | 8.1 |
Pricing Comparison
| Feature | Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3) | Grok Speech (STT + TTS APIs) |
|---|---|---|
| Free Tier | Yes | No |
| Starting Price | $0 | $0.10 |
Which Should You Pick?
Pick Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3) if...
- ✓Has a free tier
Chinese-market builders, multilingual products that need strong CN performance, and cost-sensitive developers who want frontier-class quality at sub-DeepSeek pricing. Also anyone watching the open-weights field who wants Tencent's distribution-backed entry on the bench.
Visit Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3)Pick Grok Speech (STT + TTS APIs) if...
Developers building voice agents, real-time transcription tools, accessibility features, or high-volume TTS workloads where the cost per hour of audio actually matters at scale. Strong fit for phone-call and meeting transcription use cases where xAI's published WER advantage (5.0% on phone-call entities vs. ElevenLabs 12.0%) compounds quickly.
Visit Grok Speech (STT + TTS APIs)Our Verdict
Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3) and Grok Speech (STT + TTS APIs) are extremely close overall. Your choice comes down to specific needs -- Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3) is better for chinese-market builders, multilingual products that need strong cn performance, and cost-sensitive developers who want frontier-class quality at sub-deepseek pricing, while Grok Speech (STT + TTS APIs) works best for developers building voice agents, real-time transcription tools, accessibility features, or high-volume tts workloads where the cost per hour of audio actually matters at scale.