Speech with a little more personality

Hey, kittens. Welcome in. KittenML makes small speech models that pay attention to more than the words: EmoKitten ASR preserves expression in a transcript, while KittenTTS turns text into a voice with one of three tiny, free models.

Every hosted API is available from one hostname:

https://api.kittenml.com

Choose an endpoint

Protocol	Endpoint	Use it for
HTTPS	POST /v1/audio/transcriptions	Transcribe a complete audio file
WebSocket	WSS /v1/stt/realtime	Stream audio and receive partial transcripts
WebRTC	/v1/realtime/client_secrets + /v1/realtime/calls	Stream a browser microphone without exposing a permanent API key
HTTPS	POST /v1/audio/speech	Stream generated speech

Upload STT, realtime STT, and streaming TTS are the three public inference operations. Realtime STT supports both server-side WebSocket clients and browser WebRTC clients. Older realtime helper routes are not part of the public contract.

All three endpoints require a KittenML API key. The KittenTTS 0.8 models are free, but authentication is still required.

The fastest way to learn the API is to run an example, change it, and see what happens. Test it. Break it. If something sounds strange, tell us what you heard.

Create or manage an API key in the KittenML Playground.

Try speech to text

export KITTENML_API_KEY="sk_kitten_live_..."

curl --fail-with-body -sS \
  https://api.kittenml.com/v1/audio/transcriptions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KITTENML_API_KEY" \
  -F "file=@speech.wav" \
  -F "model=emokittenasr-realtime" \
  -F "response_format=json"

An abridged response looks like this:

{
  "text": "A cold, lucid indifference reigned in his soul.",
  "enriched_text": "[low][slow]A (cold), [pause_short] (lucid) (indifference) reigned in his (soul).[/slow][/low]",
  "accent": "General American",
  "request_id": "<request-id>"
}

text is the clean transcript. enriched_text, accent, and tags are KittenML extensions that preserve vocal delivery information when the model detects it.

Try text to speech

curl --fail-with-body -sS \
  https://api.kittenml.com/v1/audio/speech \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KITTENML_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data '{
    "model": "kitten-tts-mini-0.8",
    "input": "Hello from the KittenML API.",
    "voice": "Bella",
    "response_format": "mp3",
    "stream_format": "audio"
  }' \
  --output kitten-output.mp3

Next steps

↗Get startedMake your first speech-to-text and text-to-speech requests.↗API conventionsLearn authentication, errors, request IDs, and response behavior.↗Explore modelsCompare the supported ASR and KittenTTS model identifiers.↗Run examplesStart from working cURL, Python, and Node.js integrations.