This is Act II of the studio ladder: getting a character to speak on screen. We frame the whole craft as two roads and teach you to choose per shot. **Road A, native-audio models (one pass):** prompt a generator that makes picture plus a synced dialogue track together. Google Veo 3.1 (synchronized dialogue, SFX, ambient, music at 48kHz, lip-sync reportedly under 120ms; Fast ~$0.15/sec, Standard/Quality ~$0.40/sec, Lite ~$0.03-0.05/sec no audio; Veo 3 shuts down June 30, 2026), [ByteDance Seedance 2.0](https://artificialanalysis.ai/video/arena) (unified multimodal, leads audio-inclusive charts), Kling 2.6/3.0, Grok Imagine Video 1.5 (up to 15s, 480p/720p, multilingual lip-sync). **Road B, the decoupled pipeline:** silent clip + separate voice + dedicated lip-sync pass on the mouth region. You own the exact voiceover, revise without re-rendering the picture, keep a clean stem. **How it works:** [phonemes map to visemes](https://mocaponline.com/blogs/mocap-news/lip-sync-animation-guide) (b/p/m share one shape); neural models (Wav2Lip, 2020) skip visemes via a lip-sync expert discriminator. Audio-driven vs. performance-driven. **Voice:** [ElevenLabs](https://elevenlabs.io/pricing) - Free $0, Starter $5-6 (commercial rights + Instant Voice Cloning), Creator $22 (Professional Voice Cloning), Pro $99. [Eleven v3](https://elevenlabs.io/v3) adds Audio Tags. Consent matters: [Tennessee ELVIS Act](https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2024/04/first-of-its-kind-ai-law-addresses-deep-fakes-and-voice-clones) (July 2024); NO FAKES Act pending; clone only with signed consent. **Lip-sync tools:** [Sync.so](https://sync.so/pricing) lipsync-2 ($0.04/sec) and lipsync-2-pro (diffusion, 4K, active-speaker detection); Hedra Character-3 (whole-face); [Runway Act-Two](https://help.runwayml.com/hc/en-us/articles/42311337895827) (performance/gesture); Kling; [HeyGen](https://www.heygen.com/api-pricing) (dubbing at scale); D-ID (live agents); open-weights (Wav2Lip, LatentSync, LivePortrait). **Workflow:** script -> voiceover first -> visual -> sync -> check on a big screen -> fix in the NLE. Cutaways hide a bad sync. Rough in cheap modes, finalize the keeper once. News: [Gemini Omni Flash](https://www.testingcatalog.com/google-launches-nano-banana-2-lite-and-gemini-omni-flash/) public preview ($0.10/sec) and Nano Banana 2 Lite; [Seedance 2.5](https://www.techtimes.com/articles/319639/20260703/bytedance-seedance-25-launches-this-week-30-second-ai-video-carries-copyright-cloud.htm) rollout window (30-second native, copyright cloud).