Text-to-speech cost on Sume, by script length

Sume prices text-to-speech by characters, spaces and punctuation included, and one request accepts at most 20,000 characters, so a long script is split into several jobs. The cost of a script follows its length; the table gives it for every script these posts priced.

Worked example: Text-to-speech cost for a short book: 10,000 words

10,000 words of narration for a short book cost about $2.85 on Sume TTS. Sume prices text-to-speech at $0.0475 per 1,000 characters, spaces and punctuation included, and one request accepts at most 20,000 characters, so this script takes 3 jobs.

The character count is an estimate: it assumes about 6 characters per English word including the space. Count your own script with len(text) for the real number.

How is the price built?

The rate comes from Sume's catalog entry sume/tts-1.0: $0.0475 per 1,000 characters, estimated at 1,000 characters, minimum 1, maximum 20,000 per request.

How do I split a script that is over 20,000 characters?

Split on paragraph boundaries into 3 chunks of under 20,000 characters, submit one job per chunk, and join the audio in a Timeline.

import re

def chunks(text: str, limit: int = 20000) -> list[str]:
    out, cur = [], ""
    for para in re.split(r"\n\s*\n", text):
        if len(cur) + len(para) + 2 > limit and cur:
            out.append(cur)
            cur = ""
        cur += para + "\n\n"
    if cur.strip():
        out.append(cur)
    return out

if __name__ == "__main__":
    sample = "First paragraph.\n\nSecond paragraph."
    print([len(c) for c in chunks(sample)])

Every script length in one table

This page replaces 10 posts that asked the same question with different numbers. Each row is one of them, with the answer it gave when it was published.