What happens when TTS QA fails (and why you get credits back) — Audra

Audra is an OpenAI-compatible batch TTS API at $25/1M characters on Essential, with −16 LUFS mastering and QA-gated billing. Not for realtime voice agents or cloning.

Who this is for

• Teams rendering long-form batch narration (courses, podcasts, docs, cron)
• Pipelines on the OpenAI SDK or plain HTTP
• Builders who want prepaid $/char without per-seat tax
• Anyone focused on QA failure UX

What you get on Essential

Essential ships 72 voices across 10 languages, −16 LUFS mastering, and QA-gated billing on an OpenAI-compatible API. Sync requests accept up to 50k characters; longer scripts use POST /v2/speech/jobs (up to 500k) with optional webhook_url.

• Model: audra-essential (plus / pro / conversations on /pricing#engines)
• Voice: slug from /voices
• Format: mp3 (default) or wav
• Optional language BCP-47 when the slug does not imply locale

curl
curl https://audratalks.com/v2/speech \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sk-live-YOUR_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"audra-essential","text":"Your narration script.","voice":"june","format":"mp3"}' \
  --output out.mp3

Python
import requests

r = requests.post(
    "https://audratalks.com/v2/speech",
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer sk-live-YOUR_KEY"},
    json={
        "model": "audra-essential",
        "text": "Your narration script.",
        "voice": "june",
        "format": "mp3",
    },
    timeout=120,
)
r.raise_for_status()
open("out.mp3", "wb").write(r.content)

JavaScript
import { writeFile } from "node:fs/promises";

const res = await fetch("https://audratalks.com/v2/speech", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: {
    Authorization: "Bearer sk-live-YOUR_KEY",
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    model: "audra-essential",
    text: "Your narration script.",
    voice: "june",
    format: "mp3",
  }),
});

if (!res.ok) throw new Error(await res.text());
await writeFile("out.mp3", Buffer.from(await res.arrayBuffer()));

Next: continue at /faq. Engine details on /pricing#engines; migration snippets on /migrate.

Cost sanity check

Want to hear a sample on your own script? Get an API key at /dashboard — 25k free characters, no card.

FAQ

Next steps

• Primary next step: continue at /faq
• A/B voices on /compare
• Honest matrices: /vs/elevenlabs and /vs/openai-tts
• Read next: /blog/tts-api-billing-qa-gated
• Related: /support