Mandarin Chinese text-to-speech API: voices, example and limits

Generate Mandarin Chinese speech from text over plain HTTP: 2 live voices, no setup beyond an API key. Simplified Chinese characters worked in our test. There is a female and a male Mandarin voice.

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
Mandarin F1	`zf_001`	female	Mandarin Chinese	32
Mandarin M1	`zm_009`	male	Mandarin Chinese	32

Hear the library

The library holds 33 checked Mandarin Chinese 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 (Mandarin Chinese, voice zf_001) took 6.2 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":"您的订单已经准备好取货。","voice":"zf_001","lang":"zh"}'

# 200 {"url":"...","lang":"zh","voice":"zf_001","format":"mp3","live":true,"review_status":"native_review_pending"}

Write numbers as words

Outside English, digits are rejected. We tested this: 您的订单号12已经准备好。 returns invalid_text. Write the number out instead: 您的订单号十二已经准备好。. 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 Mandarin Chinese 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 Mandarin Chinese 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 Mandarin Chinese?

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 zh) 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

Mandarin Chinese text to speech API