Comment by simonw
21 hours 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...
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?
Very expensive?
he's vibe writing
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.