Hey everyone! 👋 So I've been working on a side project that needs text-to-speech for some alert notifications. I was using Amazon Polly because, well, it was right there in my AWS console.
But I kept seeing WellSaid Labs mentioned in a few places and decided to try it. The difference in voice quality is honestly night and day. The WellSaid voices sound so much more natural and less robotic, especially for longer bits of text. My test alerts went from "something is wrong" to "something is SERIOUSLY wrong" 😅
Here's the thing though. I'm just a hobbyist right now, and the cost is hitting me harder than I expected. With Polly, my bill was maybe a few dollars a month. Now it's... more.
Anyone else made this switch? How do you handle the pricing, especially for non-critical or personal projects? Is there a sweet spot in their plans I'm missing?
My basic setup for my monitoring system looks like this now:
```bash
# My simple script to generate the audio
curl -X POST "https://api.wellsaidlabs.com/v1/tts/stream"
-H "Authorization: Bearer $WELLSAID_API_KEY"
-H "Content-Type: application/json"
-d '{
"voice_id": "22",
"text": "Alert: High CPU utilization detected on server main-db-01.",
"format": "mp3"
}'
```
The output is fantastic. Just wondering if the cost is the new normal for good quality TTS.