Audra FAQ

What's under audra-essential? Essential — hosted inference plus our production stack: chunking, −16 LUFS mastering, QA gate, and billing. See /docs/engine.

Why pay if the weights are open source? You pay for uptime, a production API, long-form chunking, loudness mastering, automated QA, and zero GPU ops — not the model weights.

Is it OpenAI compatible? Yes. Change your client to POST /v2/speech with model audra-essential. See the quickstart in /docs.

Do you support voice cloning? No. Audra provides preset voices only. For cloning or custom brand voices, use ElevenLabs.

What languages are supported? Essential ships 72 voices across 10 languages: English (US & UK), Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), Hindi, French, Italian, German, and Dutch. English remains the primary language; quality varies by voice and locale.

What's the max text length? 50,000 characters per synchronous request (413 if exceeded). For longer batch narration, use POST /v2/speech/jobs (up to 500,000 characters) and poll until completed. Optional webhook_url notifies your server when the job finishes. Text above ~8,000 characters on /v2/speech is auto-queued as a background job unless you pass X-Audra-Sync: true.

How does billing work? Prepaid credits, billed per Unicode character of trimmed input. Credits reserve when a render starts; if the job fails QA (audio shorter than expected or long silence gaps) or errors, credits auto-refund.

Is there a free tier? Yes — 25,000 characters once on signup, for evaluation.

Can I use the free tier commercially? No. Commercial use requires a paid credit purchase, which unlocks commercial flag and higher rate limits. Send X-Audra-Commercial-Use: true on production renders after purchasing.

I lost my API key — can you resend it? We cannot resend the same key. Sign in at /dashboard (Google or email), open /dashboard/keys to create or rotate keys, or use /dashboard/recover for account recovery (revokes all keys and issues one new key via email).

What's your refund policy? Failed renders (QA gate or server error) auto-refund credits to your balance. Unused prepaid packs: email hello@audratalks.com within 7 days for manual refund review — not automated in Stripe yet. See /refund.

Do you offer an SLA? Best-effort in v1 — no uptime guarantee. Check /status for current health.

What is your data retention policy? We do not persist input text or generated audio — only character counts for billing and account metadata. We do not sell your data. See /privacy.

What are the rate limits? 60 requests/minute on free tier, 120 requests/minute on commercial (paid) accounts. On 429, respect the Retry-After header (seconds). Long-form jobs should use fewer, larger requests (up to 50k chars) instead of many tiny ones.

How fast is rendering? Is it real-time? Audra is optimized for batch narration, not sub-200ms live agents. On GPU (Modal), ~500 chars often completes in under 15 seconds; ~10k chars in under 2 minutes sync. Long jobs (50k+ chars) should use POST /v2/speech/jobs. Sync HTTP is capped at 50k characters; use background jobs for chapters or when you need webhook delivery.

How does quality compare to ElevenLabs? Different tradeoff, not a clone. Essential presets with −16 LUFS mastering and QA-gated billing — strong for podcasts, YouTube, courses, and audiobook-style narration at $25/1M. ElevenLabs wins on voice cloning, a larger library, and sub-200ms realtime. Try 25k free chars on your scripts. See /vs/elevenlabs.

What support do you offer? v1 is best-effort — no SLA or phone support. Start at /support and /faq. Email hello@audratalks.com from your account email with request IDs or timestamps. Check /status before escalating. Enterprise teams above 50M chars/month can email for custom pricing and priority handling.

How long does ElevenLabs migration take? Under 5 minutes if you're already on the OpenAI SDK. See the migration guide at /migrate.

What audio formats are supported? MP3 (128 kbps, default) and WAV. Set response_format in your request.

What are delivery_profile, script_enhance, and audio_post? Optional quality fields on POST /v2/speech. delivery_profile tunes long-form prosody (legacy, podcast_v2, podcast_v3, podcast_v4). script_enhance adds paragraph breaks and host-style intros (off, auto, podcast). audio_post applies a mastering chain (off, auto, broadcast, warm, podcast). Try presets in /dashboard/playground — see /docs.

Do you support background batch rendering or webhooks? Yes. POST /v2/speech/jobs queues batch renders up to 500k characters. Poll GET /v2/speech/jobs/{id} until status is completed, then download GET /v2/speech/jobs/{id}/audio. Pass webhook_url for a completion callback.

Are volume discounts automatic? Not at checkout. Prepaid credit packs are always $25 per million characters. Your /v2/usage response shows an effective rate by monthly volume for planning — tier pricing is not applied to pack purchases yet.

Can I self-host instead? Yes — audra-essential builds on Apache 2.0 licensed components. See /docs/legal/open-source. We win on convenience, QA, and API.

Do you offer enterprise plans? Email hello@audratalks.com when you exceed 50M characters/month for custom pricing and support.

Why am I getting HTTP 402? 402 means insufficient credits or commercial use is blocked. Top up at /dashboard/billing. After any paid pack, send header X-Audra-Commercial-Use: true on production renders. Free-trial evaluation renders do not need the header.

Why am I getting HTTP 502, 503, or 504? Usually a cold-start while the GPU TTS worker wakes (often 5–30 seconds after idle). Wait a few seconds and retry — the dashboard and playground retry automatically once. In your own client, retry 502/503/504 with backoff before escalating to support.

My HTTP client times out on long scripts — what should I do? Set client timeouts to at least 3600 seconds for sync. Text above ~8k characters auto-queues as a background job unless you pass X-Audra-Sync: true. For chapters or batch pipelines, use POST /v2/speech/jobs (up to 500k chars) and poll or pass webhook_url.

Does SSML work the same as ElevenLabs? Audra supports common SSML on POST /v2/speech — e.g. <break time="600ms"/>. Try the playground at /dashboard/playground. Not every ElevenLabs tag maps 1:1; test your script before shipping.

Why am I getting HTTP 401 or 403? Missing or invalid API key. Send Authorization: Bearer sk-live-… on every request. Create or rotate keys at /dashboard/keys. Test keys and live keys are not interchangeable in production.

How do I install the Audra SDK? npm install @nickaisbitt/audra or pip install audra. The OpenAI SDK also works — point base URL at https://audratalks.com/v1 and use model audra-essential. See /docs.