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Overview

AudioPod AI’s Text to Speech service provides unified text-to-speech capabilities for both standard pre-built voices and custom voice clones. Generate speech with any of 200+ voices across 200+ languages using AudioSonic, AudioPod’s text-to-speech engine.

Supported Voice Types

  • Standard Voices: Pre-built professional voices with various characteristics
  • Custom Voices: Your own voice clones created via Voice Management
  • Unified API: Same endpoint works for both voice types seamlessly with automatic routing

Key Features

  • 200+ Voices: Pre-built voices with unique characteristics, plus your own custom clones
  • Inline Directing: Steer emotion, delivery, non-verbal sounds, pauses, and pronunciation right inside the text — on every plan
  • Word / Character Timestamps: Follow-along timing sidecar for captions and highlighting
  • Custom Voice Support: Use your own voice clones and collections
  • Variable Speed Control: Adjust speech speed from 0.25x to 4.0x
  • Multiple Formats: MP3, WAV, OGG audio formats
  • Async Processing: Background job processing with real-time status tracking
  • Credit Management: Automatic credit reservation and billing

Authentication

All endpoints require authentication. Use one of these methods:
  • API Key (Recommended): X-API-Key: your_api_key header
  • JWT Token: Authorization: Bearer your_jwt_token (for session-based auth)

API Endpoints Quick Reference

Quick Start (cURL)

Generate Speech

Basic Text to Speech

Generate speech from text using any voice (standard or custom) by voice UUID, ID, or name. All generation is processed asynchronously with job tracking.
Parameters (submit as application/x-www-form-urlencoded form fields):
  • voice_id (required): Voice UUID, ID, or name from your voice collection (path parameter)
  • input_text (required): Text to convert to speech (max 20,000 characters per request; may include inline directing — see below)
  • audio_format (optional): Output format - mp3, wav, ogg (default: mp3)
  • speed (optional): Speech speed 0.25-4.0 (default: 1.0)
  • language (optional): Language code - auto-detected if not provided
  • generation_params (optional): JSON string of premium-voice controls — delivery_mode, timestamp_type, text_normalization (see Delivery & timestamp controls)
Response:

Inline Directing

Steer the performance directly inside input_text — no separate parameters needed. Inline directing is available on every plan, including the free tier.

Emotion & delivery cues

Lead a segment with a bracketed direction of one or two words. It sets the mood for the text that follows, until the next cue.

Non-verbal sounds

Drop a bracketed tag where you want a natural, non-verbal sound:
Supported tags: [laugh] [sigh] [clear throat] [breathe] [cough] [yawn] [chuckle] [gasp] [groan].

Pauses

Insert a timed silence with a self-closing break tag. Each pause is capped at 10 seconds, and you can use up to 20 breaks per request.

Pronunciation (inline IPA)

Wrap a word’s IPA pronunciation in forward slashes to override how it’s spoken:

Delivery & timestamp controls

Pass a JSON string in the generation_params form field to tune delivery and request a timestamp sidecar.

Timestamps

When you request timestamp_type, the completed job response includes a timestamps_url — a short-lived presigned URL to a sidecar file with per-word (or per-character) timing. Use it to drive live captions, karaoke-style highlighting, or word-accurate video alignment.
Each entry pairs a token with its start/end time in seconds:

Voice Identification Examples

Available Voices

AudioPod AI offers a diverse collection of voices including both standard pre-built voices and custom voice clones:

Voice Types

  • Standard Voices: Professional pre-built voices with unique characteristics
  • Custom Voices: Your own voice clones created from audio samples
  • Public Voices: Community-shared voices available to all users

Listing Available Voices

Use the voice profiles endpoint to discover all available voices:

Job Status Tracking

Check Job Status

Monitor your text-to-speech generation jobs with real-time status updates:

Job Status Response

Status Values

  • pending: Job created and waiting for processing
  • processing: Currently generating audio
  • completed: Audio generation finished successfully
  • failed: Generation failed with error

Configuration Options

Audio Format Options

Basic Voice Customization

Language Detection

AudioPod AI automatically detects the language of your input text, but you can specify it explicitly for better results:

Multi-Language Support

Language Codes

AudioPod AI supports 100+ languages with automatic detection and consistent quality across all supported languages:

Multi-Language Example

Get Supported Languages for a Voice

Use Cases & Examples

Audiobook Narration

Podcast Introduction

Direct the delivery with inline markup — a leading [direction], timed <break/> pauses, and (optionally) generation_params. No SSML.

E-Learning Content

Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

Best Practices

Text Optimization

✅ Good Practices:
  • Use proper punctuation for natural pauses
  • Write numbers in word form for better pronunciation
  • Include context for abbreviations
  • Break long sentences into shorter ones
❌ Common Issues:
  • ALL CAPS TEXT (sounds like shouting)
  • Missing punctuation (unnatural flow)
  • Technical jargon without context
  • Extremely long paragraphs

Cost Optimization

Caching Strategy

Error Handling

Common Errors and Solutions

Causes: - Text too long (>20,000 characters) - Invalid characters or encoding - Empty text field - Malformed generation_params JSON Solutions: - Split long text into chunks - Check text encoding (UTF-8) - Validate text is not empty - Verify generation_params is a valid JSON object
Causes: - Voice identifier doesn’t exist - Voice not accessible by user
  • Voice UUID format invalid Solutions: - Check available voices with voice profiles endpoint - Verify voice UUID format - Ensure voice is public or owned by user
Causes: - Not enough credits for audio generation - Credit limit exceeded Solutions: - Check credit balance - Purchase more credits - Wait for credit reset
Causes: - Rate limit exceeded - Too many concurrent requests Solutions: - Implement exponential backoff - Use request queuing - Upgrade to higher rate limits

Robust Error Handling

Pricing

Text to Speech is billed differently depending on how you authenticate: All voice types (standard and custom) use the same rate. Quality settings do not affect pricing.

Cost Examples — account credits (per character)

Cost Examples — API wallet (per minute of output)

Next Steps

Voice Management

Create custom voices from audio samples.

Voice Examples

Listen to voice samples and find your perfect voice.