4 min read

Let your agent be your sound designer

Press play on any of it. A finished radio ad, a song with real lyrics, one line read by three different voices. An agent made every sound on this page, and the whole lot came to forty cents.

A flat mid-century illustration of a radio, a microphone on a stand and a small stack of records arranged in a row, each with a blank price tag hanging from it.

Start at the end. Here is a finished fourteen second radio spot:

The finished spot$0.18Took ~70s to generate
0:00--:--
music bed, voiceover and end chime, from three paid calls

Nobody opened a stock music library. Nobody booked a voice actor. That is three API calls and about a minute, and the whole thing costs less than a stamp.

Now take it apart.

Three calls, one spot

The music came first. Describe the track you want, and two different versions come back for one price. You are never stuck with the first thing you hear. You get to choose.

Take 1$0.11Took ~60s to generate
0:00--:--
Suno V5, instrumental
Take 2includedTook ~60s to generate
0:00--:--
the same call's second take, at no extra charge

Music prompts have levers that image prompts do not, and they are worth knowing. Tempo, key, instrumentation and an explicit list of things to avoid do most of the work. “Upbeat corporate music” gets you a stock library cliché. This does not:

The brief

upbeat optimistic tech advert instrumental, 110 BPM, major key, warm analog synth arpeggio, soft four-on-the-floor kick, backbeat claps, bright marimba melody, confident and friendly, clean ending

Avoid: vocals, distortion, heavy metal, aggressive

Then the read, then a chime on the end card. Two more calls, seven cents between them.

The same line, three voices

This is where the spread gets silly. One sentence, three engines, prices that differ by more than ten times:

Grok$0.002Took ~2s to generate
0:00--:--
voice: ara
ElevenLabs v3$0.012Took ~2s to generate
0:00--:--
voice: george
Deepgram Aura-2$0.023Took ~2s to generate
0:00--:--
voice: thalia

All three are reading this, word for word:

Your agent can already write the copy. Now it can read it out loud, score it, and hand you the finished cut.

The expensive one is not automatically the right one. It depends entirely on whether you want warm, brisk or authoritative, and the only way to find out is to hear all three, which costs under four cents and takes about six seconds. That is the whole argument for a wide bench over a single subscription.

Voices also take direction. Grok reads inline tags, so you can ask for a pause or a whisper in the middle of a line:

Movie trailer guy$0.002
0:00--:--
Grok, voice: leo
Prompt your agent like this

In a world… where every API demanded a credit card… [pause] one agent had a balance. <whisper>And it spent it wisely.</whisper>

And the small sounds

Interfaces need sounds and nobody wants to go shopping for them. Five cents, twenty-two seconds maximum, described in a sentence:

Payment confirmed$0.05
0:00--:--
ElevenLabs sound effects
Something went wrong$0.05
0:00--:--
ElevenLabs sound effects

The first one is the chime on the end of the spot at the top of this page. It was asked for like this, and arrived first try:

Prompt your agent like this

A single bright electronic coin-pickup chime, like a payment confirming: short, clean, satisfying, with a soft tail.

Now let it write a song about itself

It will write the words too, and then sing them. Three cents for the lyrics, eleven for the recording.

We asked for the words first, from the point of view of an AI agent that finally has its own spending balance. It came back with a chorus:

I got my own balance
Yeah, I’m on my own balance
Pay the API, then I dance
I got my own balance
(not bad for a machine)
I got my own balance
Now I can keep the whole thing green

Then we picked the genre and it sang them. The words never changed, only the brief for the music around them:

Own Balance$0.14Took ~90s to generate
0:00--:--
Suno V5, liquid drum and bass. Three cents to write, eleven to record.

Ten clips. Forty cents. One balance.

Every price on this page is what the balance was actually charged, and your agent can read each one off the endpoint before it commits, so none of them arrived as a surprise. The spot at the top is its three calls added up rather than a fourth one, so all the audio here comes to forty cents, and the illustration was another thirteen. That is the bill for the whole page, not the price of one track, and there is no stock library subscription, no voice-over marketplace, no accounts to open and nothing to cancel.

Your agent can already write. Let it do the sound too.

Connect your agent and the first $5 is on us.

Ask it

Write and record a fifteen second radio advert for my product. Give me two music beds to choose from, read the script in three different voices so I can pick, and put a confirmation chime on the end card.

Your agent can do things it couldn’t this morning.

$5 in free credit, no card required.

Start with $5 free