Terms of service

What this is

Speaker ("we", "us") turns text you submit into synthetic speech and returns the audio together with word timings. You ("you", "the customer") pay per 1,000 characters at the rates published on our pricing page. We are an independent Ounie product.

Billing

There is no subscription. Runs are billed in Ounie credits (1 credit = 1¢) from your shared Ounie wallet, at 10 credits per 1,000 characters on the fast engines and 20 on the rich one, rounded up with a one-credit floor. Credits are reserved on the characters you submit and settled on the characters actually spoken, never above the reservation. A run that returns audio with no usable character alignment — and therefore no word timings — settles at zero and refunds in full, automatically, to the exact pools it was drawn from. Credits are purchased and managed on ounie.com; your past runs stay readable and downloadable regardless of your balance.

Keyless x402 calls are paid per call in USDC. A request we can see is invalid is refused before any price is quoted. Otherwise the payment is verified before the synthesis runs and settled only once audio and word timings both exist, so a run with no timings is refused rather than charged. A settled x402 payment is final.

What this is not — read this one

The output is synthetic speech, and it is your responsibility to say so wherever that matters. Many jurisdictions, platforms and advertising codes require synthetic or AI-generated audio to be disclosed. We do not disclose it for you, we do not watermark the audio, and nothing about a file we return marks it as machine-made. If you publish it, the duty to label it is yours.

The word timings are DERIVED, not measured from the audio. No speech engine returns word timings. Where an engine returns a character-level alignment we group it into words, which is exact and deterministic but inherits whatever accuracy that alignment has. Where an engine returns audio alone, we transcribe our own output and align the transcript back onto your text; the words returned are always yours, but the boundaries inherit the transcriber's accuracy, and a word the transcriber did not hear is interpolated and flagged estimated. Every response says which method produced it. We do not control or warrant either engine's accuracy. Where safety, accessibility compliance or legal obligation depends on caption accuracy, check the result rather than assuming it.

Speaker routes your text to one of several third-party speech engines, and to a transcription service where timings must be recovered from the audio. Which engine serves a given call depends on availability and is reported in every response. Do not submit text you are not permitted to disclose to a third-party processor.

The voices are the active engine's own catalogue. This product cannot clone a voice, accepts no voice samples, and offers no way to imitate a specific person. Do not attempt to use it to impersonate anyone.

Acceptable use

Submit text you have the right to publish. Do not use the service to impersonate a real person, to generate audio intended to deceive someone about who is speaking, for harassment, for fraud, or for unlawful robocalling. Do not present synthetic speech as a recording of a real person. Do not attempt to discover endpoints we have not documented, bypass rate limits, or resell raw access to the service.

Your content

You keep whatever rights you have in the text you submit and in the audio produced from it. We store both so that reading and downloading past runs stays free, we do not publish either, and we do not use either to train any model. Audio objects are private and served only through short-lived signatures.

Availability

The service depends on a third-party speech engine, which may refuse or throttle requests under its own policies. When it is unavailable we refuse up front with a 503 and charge nothing — no credits held, no payment quoted. We cannot guarantee uninterrupted availability.

No warranty

The service is provided as-is, without warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement.

Refunds

Runs with no word timings, and failed runs, refund automatically — the credit reservation is reversed to the exact pools it was drawn from. For anything else, open a support ticket.

Liability

Our liability is capped at the amount you paid us in the prior 12 months. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential damages, including any loss arising from your use or publication of synthetic speech, or from reliance on a derived word timing.

Termination

Either party can terminate at any time. You keep access to runs you have already paid for and can download them before closing your account. We may suspend accounts for material violations of these terms with notice.

Contact

/contact · routed to ounie@ounie.com