> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.cartesia.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Choosing a Voice

> How to pick the best voice for your Voice Agents

When designing a voice agent experience, the voice that your agents will speak in is a critical choice that will influence your customers' experience.

Cartesia offers 500+ voices out-out-of-box, as well as the ability to clone your own voices.

### Featured Voices

We feature a set of Voices that we've found work well for our customers and pass our internal quality checks. These voices are a great starting point to find the best Voice for your voice agent.

Featured Voices are displayed with a check mark icon next to their names on [play.cartesia.ai](https://play.cartesia.ai/).

### Stable voices (best for voice agents)

For voice agents in production, we've found that more stable, realistic voices perform better than studio quality, emotive voices. From our testing, we think these are the top performing English Voices for voice agents:

* **Male**: Ronald, Carson
* **Female**: Katie, Jacqueline, Brooke

### Emotive voices (best for AI characters)

Sonic is expressive with some voices like Tessa and Maya labeled as emotive in the playground, and respond well to [emotion instructions](/build-with-cartesia/capability-guides/volume-speed-emotion).

If your use case requires more expressive speech (e.g. companion apps, game characters), then we suggest trying:

* **Male**: Kyle, Cory
* **Female**: Tessa, Ariana

We tag such voices as Emotive in our playground and you can see a full list [here](https://play.cartesia.ai/voices?tags=Emotive).