Comment by simonw
2 days ago
I vibe coded a playground UI for trying this out. The conversation mode is neat, and it's very expensive - most of my experiments have cost less than a cent.
https://tools.simonwillison.net/gemini-tts-playground#compos...
Nice but in general I wouldn't put my API key into some third party website, no matter if it claims to not store it. It's not something personal, you are a bit of a celeb here so I wouldn't think you'd save the keys, it's just good general data hygiene. Especially not if a leaked API key can rack up thousands of dollars in fees quickly.
Sure. Feel free to copy the code and run it yourself instead.
Example (topical, pelican themed) audio clip here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/23/gemini-tts-playground/
Why tho? AI Studio has this model available and I don't need to paste the API key anywhere
https://aistudio.google.com/generate-speech?model=gemini-3.8...
Because building my own is a better way to understand the capabilities of the model and how to use it - and to verify that it can be used via CORS.
Did you 'build' it or did you vibe code it?
1 reply →
Very expensive?
he's vibe writing