OpenRouter Text-to-Speech

Synthesize speech via POST /api/v1/audio/speech using curl. The endpoint is OpenAI-compatible, so the OpenAI SDKs work by pointing them at https://openrouter.ai/api/v1. Requires OPENROUTER_API_KEY (get one at https://openrouter.ai/keys). If unset, stop and ask.

One call, raw bytes back

The response body is the audio bytes — write them to a file with the extension matching response_format. It is not JSON; error responses are, so only try to parse JSON when the status is non-200.

Two response headers are worth keeping:

• Content-Type — audio/mpeg for mp3; for pcm it includes the sample rate and channel count, e.g. audio/pcm;rate=24000;channels=1. Parse these parameters if you need to wrap the raw bytes into a WAV container.
• X-Generation-Id — the generation ID (format gen-tts-<timestamp>-<suffix>), useful for tracking, debugging, and cost lookups.

Drop-in workflow

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail