OpenRouter Text-to-Speech: API Tutorial in 5 Minutes

OpenRouter provides text-to-speech through its OpenAI-compatible POST /api/v1/audio/speech endpoint, allowing developers to use one API key and a consistent request format across speech models from multiple providers. Requests require a model, text input, and generally a model-supported voice, with optional output format and speed settings; successful responses return raw audio bytes, while failures return JSON and should be validated before saving. The tutorial demonstrates generating MP3 files with cURL, Python requests, JavaScript, and the OpenAI Python SDK configured with OpenRouter’s base URL, emphasizing HTTP status checks, content-type validation, and generation-ID logging. Available voices, formats, pricing, and provider-specific controls vary by model, with examples including Mistral Voxtral Mini TTS, xAI Grok Voice TTS, and Microsoft MAI-Voice-2. For production use, it recommends splitting lengthy text into segments, recording generation metadata, retrying temporary errors with backoff, avoiding retries for invalid requests or credential issues, and checking the current Models API or model pages for supported capabilities.

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