cURL TTS API quickstart: first Audra MP3 in 60 seconds — Audra
You can hear your first Audra voice before installing anything. One curl command, an API key from /dashboard (25,000 free characters, no card), and about two minutes of render time — that is the whole quickstart.
The 60-second path
Sign up, create a key at /dashboard/keys, export it, and run the request exactly as documented at /docs:
export AUDRA_KEY=sk-audra-xxxxxxxxxxxx
curl https://audratalks.com/v2/speech \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $AUDRA_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"model":"audra-essential","voice":"june","text":"Hello world","format":"mp3"}' \
--output out.mp3Field by field: model is audra-essential, voice is a slug from /voices (try wren or june(2)+wren(1) for a blend), text is your script, format is mp3 (128 kbps) or wav. Auth is a plain Bearer token in the Authorization header.
Listening to it
The response body is the raw audio — no JSON envelope, no base64. out.mp3 is a mastered 128 kbps MP3 at −16 LUFS: play it with afplay out.mp3 (macOS) or ffplay out.mp3. If it sounds right, the integration is done; everything else (jobs, webhooks, SDKs) is scale, not correctness.
Debugging the four first-day errors
- 401 — the Authorization header is missing the Bearer prefix, or the key was rotated. Keys are SHA-256 hashed at rest; re-copy from /dashboard/keys.
- 402 — out of credits. The 25k trial grant covers roughly 50 typical short renders; top up at /dashboard/billing.
- 429 — rate limit. Free keys: 60 requests/minute. The Retry-After header gives the wait in seconds; curl does not honor it, so a shell sleep is on you.
- Empty file with a 200 — your shell mangled the JSON quoting. Use the single-quoted -d form above; on Windows, save the JSON to a file and pass -d @body.json.
Longer than ~8,000 characters? The sync endpoint auto-queues it as a background job — POST /v2/speech/jobs instead and poll GET /v2/speech/jobs/{id}. Next stop after curl: the platform integrations at /blog/zapier-tts-http-audra and /blog/github-actions-tts-narration, or the SDK post at /blog/python-openai-sdk-audra-tts.