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Cloud Speech Install

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Setup guide

Set up OpenAI

OpenAI has expressive text-to-speech voices (tts-1, tts-1-hd, and gpt-4o-mini-tts) with the simplest setup of the four cloud providers: one API key, no region, no cloud console maze. It takes about 5 minutes.

What you'll need

  • An OpenAI platform account with billing set up (there is no free tier for speech)
  • About 5 minutes
  1. 1

    Create an OpenAI account

    1. Go to platform.openai.com and sign up (or sign in)
    2. Open Settings → Billing and add a payment method or buy prepaid credits; API access is pay-as-you-go and separate from ChatGPT subscriptions

    Tip: prepaid credits let you cap how much you can ever spend.

  2. 2

    Generate an API key

    1. Go to platform.openai.com/api-keys
    2. Click Create new secret key
    3. Name it, e.g. Cloud Speech extension
    4. Click Create secret key and copy the key (it starts with sk-)

    Security warning

    Copy the key immediately, because OpenAI will never show it again. Keep it secret; anyone with it can spend your credits. You can revoke it from the same page at any time.
  3. 3

    Connect the extension

    1. Click the extension icon in your browser toolbar
    2. Open Settings → OpenAI
    3. Paste your API key
    4. Click Save & test

    Once the test passes, the OpenAI voices appear in the voice picker. Press ▶ to preview any voice and ★ to favorite the ones you like. Then highlight text on any page, right-click, and choose Read aloud, or press Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+S.

    Good to know

    OpenAI voices support speed control only. The pitch and volume sliders don't apply to them (they do with Polly, Azure, and Google voices).

Costs

OpenAI has no free tier for text-to-speech. As a rough guide, tts-1 costs about $15 per 1 million characters and tts-1-hd about twice that. gpt-4o-mini-tts is billed differently, by text-input and audio-output tokens rather than characters, but works out roughly the same as tts-1 per minute of audio in practice. Check the official OpenAI pricing page and our provider comparison.

Remove access when you're done

  1. Open platform.openai.com/api-keys, find the key you created, and choose Revoke. It stops working immediately.
  2. In the extension, open Settings → OpenAI and clear the saved key (or turn the provider off).

OpenAI has no command-line tool for key management; keys are created and revoked only on the dashboard.

Troubleshooting

"Credentials are missing or invalid"

Double-check the key you pasted; a stray space is the most common cause. Check the key wasn't revoked and that your account has billing set up or remaining credits. Then click Save & test again.

"Access denied" or rate-limit errors

Verify your account is in good standing, has remaining credits, and hasn't exceeded its rate limits. Limits rise automatically as your usage grows.

For no audio, missing voices, or keyboard shortcut problems, see the troubleshooting guide.

Prefer a different provider? See Amazon Polly, Azure Speech, or Google Cloud TTS.