Real estate listing voice-overs: 25 homes at 700 characters

Narrating 25 property listings at 700 characters each is 17,500 characters, which costs $0.385 on MAI-Voice-2.1, $0.263 on Flash and $1.00 on Sume TTS if each listing is its own job.

As a planning assumption of 14 to 15 characters per second, a 700-character script is about 45 to 50 seconds of speech, a common size for a listing walkthrough.

The arithmetic

Rates come from Microsoft's launch page for the two MAI voices and from Sume's public TTS rate. The Sume rate is the list-price arithmetic ($0.0475 per 1,000 characters); the live figure for your workspace is in GET /v1/catalog, and a platform fee can apply on top of list arithmetic on your invoice.

Per-listing jobs versus one batch

Each 700-character job costs 4 cents on Sume (700 x $0.0000475 = $0.03325, rounded up). Twenty-five of them is $1.00. The same 17,500 characters in one request is $0.84.

The packed route needs sentence segmentation to cut the audio back into listings. Segments return as separate audio files only when the output container is wav or raw, so ask for wav in that case.

• Separate jobs let you re-voice one listing when the price changes without touching the other 24.
• Packed jobs are cheaper by 16 cents here; that is the whole gain, so choose on workflow, not on price.

What Sume does and does not offer here

Sume does not list MAI-Voice-2.1 or MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash, so the first two rows are a price reference, not something you can call through Sume. Sume TTS 1.0 is a managed voice or avatar surface at POST /v1/tts-1.0/generate, and the TTS Router lists Sonic model ids only. A request takes up to 20,000 characters; synthesized audio over 1,200 seconds fails with tts_duration_exceeded and no credit is captured. Microsoft states the Flash model generates up to 45 seconds of audio per call, which matters for long reads.

• Many short items: one request per item rounds each up to the cent, so packing items into fewer requests (up to 20,000 characters) and slicing by sentence with timestamps.words and segmentation.mode sentence on wav output avoids paying the rounding many times.
• Output defaults to mp3 at 44,100 Hz and 128 kbps; ask for wav (pcm_s16le, 44,100) when the file feeds a render or a lip-sync step.
• Speed is a multiplier from 0.6 to 1.5 and volume from 0.5 to 2.0 in generation_config; they do not change the per-character price.

Submitting it on Sume

Paid MCP tools need an idempotency_key, and a cost-only dry run is available before you spend. Use the voice or avatar you already have, set language for any non-English text, and keep one key per item so a retry never bills twice. The tool names are tts_create for synthesis and tts_source_get for the accepted-script manifest.

Treat the table as list arithmetic. Re-check the live rate in the catalog before a large batch, because Microsoft's MAI pricing is a launch announcement dated 2026-10-01 and Sume rates are read from the repository price book as of 2026-10-08.