The ranking is the press release
The #1 claim comes from one source: HeyGen's own announcement. Artificial Analysis does maintain a real, independent voice-model leaderboard, but the ranking reached the public inside HeyGen's press release, with no link to the live table and no third-party confirmation attached. That does not make the claim false. It makes it a launch tactic. Leaderboard crowns are cheap to mint and expensive to verify: who else was tested, on what prompts, in which languages, and whether anyone outside the company audited the run. None of that is in the announcement. Treat "#1" as advertising until an independent run confirms it.
The actual story is the stack
Forget the crown. The interesting part is that voice is now a format inside HeyGen's own stack, alongside its Avatar V model. Identity and voice from one vendor instead of a patchwork of text-to-speech APIs bolted onto avatar tools. This is the same playbook as HeyGen Video, which the company sells at a cent a second: own the full pipeline, push the marginal clip toward zero, charge the subscription. Voice fits the pattern — free inside the platform and API, with the money made on the premium tier. That tier, at $99 a month, is the closest thing to your own voice: trained on 30 minutes to three hours of your speech, with explicit consent required. That consent line deserves more attention than the leaderboard. An avatar company that cannot prove who said yes does not have a business.
The survey, read carefully
The launch's headline statistic — 71.6% of small business owners recorded a business video and then never posted it — comes from HeyGen's own survey of more than 1,000 users of its own product. That is not a market survey. It is a survey of the funnel: people already inside HeyGen, and unposted footage is exactly the problem the company sells the cure for. Directionally useful, but it measures the market HeyGen has, not the one it wants. The same caveat covers the company stats in the release — 40 million users, $200 million in ARR doubled in eight months, 85% of the Fortune 100. Self-reported, unaudited, rounded in the direction of the press release.
What to try
If you already use HeyGen, the test is free: swap a stock text-to-speech voice in an existing avatar video for HeyGen Voice and listen for the difference in pacing and emphasis, not just pronunciation. The $99 Professional clone only earns its keep if the standard voices keep missing your cadence — and only if you are comfortable handing the training set thirty-plus minutes of your own speech. For everyone else, the move is to wait for an independent evaluation before believing any number with a # in front of it.
Sources
- [1] HeyGen press release, PR Newswire (Oct 9, 2026)Read source
- [2] Morningstar (PR Newswire reprint)Read source