text-to-speech in natural Kazakh

Tokay turns text into speech. Send a string and a voice name, get audio back. It speaks Kazakh (model tokay-kk-v1) in six named voices, and expands numbers, currency and dates into how a Kazakh speaker would actually say them before it synthesizes. Your existing key works. One API key covers text-to-speech and speech-to-text, and both draw down the same credit balance — nothing new to provision.

Voices

Six Kazakh voices — audition them and pick by ear.

Drop-in for OpenAI TTS

Change baseURL on your OpenAI client. That’s the whole migration.

try it in one line

export GEKO_API_KEY=sk-tokay-...
npx @gekoai/sdk say "Сәлеметсіз бе!" --voice Aigerim -o hello.wav

from code

import { Geko } from "@gekoai/sdk";
import { writeFile } from "node:fs/promises";

const geko = new Geko({ apiKey: process.env.GEKO_API_KEY });

const audio = await geko.tts.create({
  text: "Сәлеметсіз бе! Тапсырыс нөмірі 152.",
  voice: "Aigerim",
});

await writeFile("hello.wav", Buffer.from(audio)); // ArrayBuffer of WAV bytes

curl -X POST "https://geko--tokay-serve-web.modal.run/v1/tts" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $GEKO_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"text":"Сәлеметсіз бе!","voice":"Aigerim"}' \
  --output hello.wav

import os, requests

res = requests.post(
    "https://geko--tokay-serve-web.modal.run/v1/tts",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['GEKO_API_KEY']}"},
    json={"text": "Сәлеметсіз бе!", "voice": "Aigerim"},
)
res.raise_for_status()
open("hello.wav", "wb").write(res.content)

Or start playback before synthesis finishes — tts.stream() yields one complete WAV per sentence:

for await (const wav of geko.tts.stream({ text: longText, voice: "Aigerim" })) {
  play(wav); // each chunk is independently playable
}

what comes back

Raw WAV bytes — 24 kHz, 16-bit PCM, mono — not JSON. The billed character count rides along in a response header:

Content-Type: audio/wav
X-Tokay-Chars: 34

See playing & saving audio for turning those bytes into files, playback, MP3, or telephony µ-law.

the parameters

param	default	what it does
`text`	— (required)	the text to speak, up to ~5,000 characters
`voice`	`Aigerim`	a name from `/v1/voices`
`model`	`tokay-kk-v1`	model id
`nfe`	`32`	diffusion steps, `8`–`64`. `16` is interactive, `32` is polished
`speed`	`1.0`	playback pace, `0.5`–`2.0`. Doesn’t change generation time
`normalize`	`true`	expand `152`, `5500 ₸`, `15%` into spoken Kazakh words

nfe is the one dial worth knowing: it trades synthesis time for fidelity, and 16 is genuinely usable on a live call. See latency & quality.

Keep your punctuation. It guides phrasing and pauses, and a trailing . / ! / ? helps the model finish the last word cleanly (the server adds one if you omit it). More in text normalization.

what it costs


Rate	$0.04 per 1,000 input characters
In credits	1 credit per character — 25,000 credits = $1.00
Billed on	input characters (`X-Tokay-Chars`), successful requests only

Roughly $1 ≈ 25,000 characters ≈ 30 minutes of speech, since Kazakh runs about 14 characters per second of audio. Streaming and the OpenAI-compatible endpoint bill identically — delivery changes, price doesn’t. Same credit pool as speech-to-text, so running dry returns HTTP 429 on both products. The catalog endpoints (/v1/models, /v1/voices, /health) are open and free.

latency and cold starts

The GPU scales to zero when idle, so the first request after a quiet period pays a cold start of tens of seconds; calls within the next few minutes are fast. The SDK’s default 120 s timeout is sized for exactly this. Three things cut perceived latency: drop nfe to 16, use tts.stream() so audio starts after sentence one instead of the full render, and keep a container warm with a periodic geko.health() if your traffic is bursty.

Voices

All six, with style and best-for hints.

Streaming

Sentence-by-sentence delivery and the raw frame protocol.

TypeScript SDK

geko.tts.create(...) and stream(...), typed end to end.

Limits

Text length, formats, rate limits, and cold starts.

get started

text-to-speech

speech-to-text

guides

sdk

reference

text-to-speech in natural Kazakh

Voices

Drop-in for OpenAI TTS

try it in one line

from code

what comes back

the parameters

what it costs

latency and cold starts

Voices

Streaming

TypeScript SDK

Limits

Voices

Drop-in for OpenAI TTS

​try it in one line

​from code

​what comes back

​the parameters

​what it costs

​latency and cold starts

Voices

Streaming

TypeScript SDK

Limits

try it in one line

from code

what comes back

the parameters

what it costs

latency and cold starts