French text-to-speech API: voices, example and limits

Generate French speech from text over plain HTTP: 1 live voice, no setup beyond an API key. French has one live voice today. Custom voices in French are beta (understandable, with small errors).

Status: every non-English result is marked native_review_pending until a native speaker approves the language. Treat the audio as unreviewed for anything customer-facing and have a native speaker listen before you ship it.

Voices

Name	Id	Gender	Description	Library clips
Siwis	`ff_siwis`	female	French	5

Hear the library

The library holds 5 checked French clips for the live voices (short words and phrases). Press to play:

Speak a sentence

Anything outside the library is generated live. Our test sentence (French, voice ff_siwis) took 7.7 seconds on 2026-10-08 through the public demo endpoint (one observation, no GPU worker on this path; do not treat it as a benchmark).

cURL

curl -X POST https://speakvora.com/api/v1/speak \
  -H "x-api-key: $SPEAKVORA_KEY" -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"text":"Votre commande est prête à être retirée.","voice":"ff_siwis","lang":"fr"}'

# 200 {"url":"...","lang":"fr","voice":"ff_siwis","format":"mp3","live":true,"review_status":"native_review_pending"}

Write numbers as words

Outside English, digits are rejected. We tested this: Votre commande numéro 12 est prête. returns invalid_text. Write the number out instead: Votre commande numéro douze est prête.. Remove placeholders such as (name) too.

Limits and honest notes

1 to 500 characters per request; the language you send must match the voice.
Live generation for this language runs on the standard lane in our tests; library clips and repeats are quick.
Your own voice is not offered in French except where noted above; use a catalog voice.
Billing is per character at $0.70 per million for catalog voices, same as English. A non-Latin character counts as a character.

Is French speech reviewed by a native speaker?

Not yet. Results carry review_status native_review_pending. English is our reference language.

Can I use my own voice in French?

Custom voices support English, with French and German in beta. Spanish, Hindi, Chinese and Japanese were not intelligible in testing and are not offered.

How do I pick the language?

Send lang as an ISO code (for example fr) and a voice from that language. Mixing a voice and a different language is rejected.

Next: all languages · how generation works · billing · errors and retries

French text to speech API