cartesia-sonic

cartesia-sonic is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from calesthio/generative-media-skills. It costs 80 tokens per session (6,236 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to Cartesia Sonic, a text-to-speech model family that turns transcripts into generated speech, with realtime streaming and controls for voices, pronunciation, language, and emotion. It also distinguishes Sonic from Cartesia’s separate voice and agent products.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for realtime voice agents, narration, dubbing, avatars, notifications, advertising audio, and localization from an existing transcript.
Why use it?
It helps developers choose a speech workflow based on latency, voice behavior, and the target media format. It prevents unrelated features such as speech-to-text or voice changing from being treated as Sonic text-to-speech.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it for realtime voice agents, narration, dubbing, avatars, notifications, advertising audio, and localization from an existing transcript.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/calesthio/generative-media-skills/cartesia-sonic
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add calesthio/generative-media-skills --skill cartesia-sonic
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/calesthio/generative-media-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for cartesia-sonic

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/calesthio/generative-media-skills/cartesia-sonic/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/calesthio/generative-media-skills/cartesia-sonic)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/calesthio/generative-media-skills/cartesia-sonic"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/calesthio/generative-media-skills/cartesia-sonic/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for cartesia-sonic

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/calesthio/generative-media-skills/cartesia-sonic"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/calesthio/generative-media-skills/cartesia-sonic.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 80 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 6,236 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 3 findings, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Memory Poisoning · line 178
    Skill manipulates agent memory, state, or stored context. Memory corruption can alter personality, override safety rules, or cause unpredictable behavior.
    Fix: Protect agent memory and state from modification by untrusted content. Use read-only memory for critical instructions and validate all state changes.
  • high Privilege Escalation · line 235
    Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.
    Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
  • high Privilege Escalation · line 395
    Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.
    Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00080 $0.06236
Opus 5 $0.00040 $0.03118
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.01247
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00624

Measured 9d ago against content hash 40e88c19c232, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cartesia-sonic scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/providers/text-to-speech/cartesia-sonic/SKILL.md · 473 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 473 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Cartesia Sonic production skill

Use this skill when a media-production agent is choosing, prompting, integrating, or reviewing Cartesia Sonic for speech output. Treat Sonic as a low-latency text-to-speech provider first; use adjacent Cartesia voice APIs only when the production need explicitly requires them.

All volatile facts below were checked against official Cartesia documentation or legal pages on 2026-07-10. Re-check before committing budgets, compliance claims, model IDs, pricing, concurrency, supported languages, or API behavior.

Provider boundary

Documented facts:

  • Sonic is Cartesia's text-to-speech model family. The current production default is sonic-3.5; API references also list sonic-3 and sonic-latest.
  • Sonic takes text and returns generated speech. It is suitable for realtime voice agents, narration, dubbing, avatars, notifications, ads, and localization when the workflow starts from a transcript.
  • Cartesia also documents Ink speech-to-text, Line hosted voice agents, voice cloning, voice localization, infill, and voice changer. Do not present all of these as "Sonic TTS"; name the exact Cartesia surface being used.
  • Voice changer is not TTS: it takes an input speech clip and returns speech with the same intonation in a different target voice.
  • Speech-to-speech or voice conversion claims should be limited to the documented voice-changer endpoints unless Cartesia's docs explicitly add another supported path.

Production heuristics:

  • Prefer Cartesia Sonic when low time-to-first-byte, conversational pacing, multilingual speech, and API streaming matter more than offline local rendering or maximal post-production editability.
  • Prefer non-realtime batch TTS providers or local TTS when the project requires air-gapped processing, predictable no-network rendering, or a license/security posture not satisfied by Cartesia's current account settings.
  • For a media pipeline, record the selected endpoint, model ID, voice ID, language, output format, Cartesia-Version, generation_config, pronunciation dictionary ID, and source transcript checksum in the asset manifest.

Read the full file on GitHub · 473 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 473 lines · 80 tokens per session scan A 40e88c19c232

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cartesia-sonic is a skill published in the GitHub repository calesthio/generative-media-skills (170 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 80 tokens to every session and 6,236 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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