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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

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...

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Example (topical, pelican themed) audio clip here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/23/gemini-tts-playground/

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.

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?

Bit of both. I define "vibe coding" as building without looking at the code at all. For this one I was reading the code to understand how it works, and I then followed up several times to adjust how it was working.

Full session here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

Very expensive?

he's vibe writing

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