API: Streaming format fallback
Streaming endpoint now defaults to audio/mpeg when the Accept header is not provided or is invalid.
API: Voices avatar and gender support
When cloning the voice, avatar and gender can be specified. Please refer to the full API reference.
Playground: Added Unpaid Invoice Warning
We’ve added a warning to the sidebar and Subscription Details page to notify you of any unpaid invoices.
Playground: Filters added to Voices page
We’ve added filters to the Voices page, allowing you to filter voices by language, gender, and other attributes.
Billing: Changed billing cycle start date
We’ve changed the default billing start day from 1st of the month to the date when a subscription is started.
UI: hiding the Usage tab
We’ve temporarily removed the more comprehensive Usage dashboard. Instead, you can obtain simple usage analytics from the Billing tab.
UI: Pitch and Speed Rate controls
We have expanded the https://console.sws.speechify.com/tts UI to showcase two extra options that our API supports through SSML: pitch and speed rate. These options allow you to customize the audio output to better suit your needs.
API: Streaming endpoint no longer returns WAV audio
As streaming audio is usually a latency-sensitive operation, and because the WAV format is not naturally suitable for streaming (due to how the file header is organized), we have decided to remove the WAV audio format from the streaming endpoint. This will allow us to focus on the more popular and streaming-friendly audio formats, such as MP3, OGG, and AAC.
API: loudness normalization option
By default, Speechify AI API does loudness normalization of the synthesize audio across different models and voices. While this can be a valuable feature for the multi-voice apps, it inevitably adds a slight delay to the audio generation process.
For that, we’re introducing the new options param to the /v1/audio/speech and /v1/audio/stream APIs, with a single nested property, loudness_normalization (boolean).
The options param may be expanded in the future for the more fine-grained control over the audio generation process.
UI: Ongoing redesign
As our product kept evolving, we realized the necessity of a more consistent and user-friendly design for the Speechify AI API dashboard. We have been working on a redesign of the user interface to make it more accessible and user-friendly. The new design includes a more modern and cleaner look, as well as better accessibility and usability features. Please let us know if you have any feedback or suggestions for further improvements.
We have finished redesigning the major parts of the dashboard, such as the navigation menu, text to speech page, voice cloning page (used to be part of the single Playground), and the API key management page. We are currently working on redesigning the remaining parts of the dashboard, such as the billing section.