alt Hacker NewsI was recently (vibe)-coding some games with my kid, and we wanted some basic text-to-speech functionality. We tested Google's Gemini models in-browser, and they worked great, so we figured we'd add them to the app. Some fun learnings:
1. You can access those models via three APIs: the Gemini API (which it turns out is only for prototyping and returned errors 30% of the time), the Vertex API (much more stable but lacking in some functionality), and the TTS API (which performed very poorly despite offering the same models). They also have separate keys (at least, Gemini vs Vertex).
2. Each of those APIs supports different parameters (things like language, whether you can pass a style prompt separate from the words you want spoken, etc). None of them offered the full combination we wanted.
3. To learn this, you have to spend a couple hours reading API docs, or alternatively, just have Claude Code read the docs then try all different combinations and figure out what works and what doesn't (with the added risk that it might hallucinate something).
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Also, usage and billing takes a DAY to update. On top of that, there are no billing caps or credit-based billing. They put the entire burden on users not to ensure that they don't have a mega bill.
Oh man let me add onto that!
4. If you read about a new Gemini model, you might want to use it - but are you using @google/genai, @google/generative-ai (wow finally deprecated) or @google-ai/generativelanguage? Silly mistake, but when nano banana dropped it was highly confusing image gen was available only through one of these.
5. Gemini supports video! But that video first has to be uploaded to "Google GenAI Drive" which will then splices it into 1 FPS images and feeds it to the LLM. No option to improve the FPS, so if you want anything properly done, you'll have to splice it yourself and upload it to generativelanguage.googleapis.com which is only accessible using their GenAI SDK. Don't ask which one, I'm still not sure.
6. Nice, it works. Let's try using live video. Open the docs, you get it mentioned a bunch of times but 0 documentation on how to actually do it. Only suggestions for using 3rd party services. When you actually find it in the docs, it says "To see an example of how to use the Live API in a streaming audio and video format, run the "Live API - Get Started" file in the cookbooks repository". Oh well, time to read badly written python.
7. How about we try generating a video - open up AI studio, see only Veo 2 available from the video models. But, open up "Build" section, and I can have Gemini 3 build me a video generation tool that will use Veo 3 via API by clicking on the example. But wait why cant we use Veo 3 in the AI studio with the same API key?
8. Every Veo 3 extended video has absolutely garbled sound and there is nothing you can do about it, or maybe there is, but by this point I'm out of willpower to chase down edgy edge cases in their docs.
9. Let's just mention one semi-related thing - some things in the Cloud come with default policies that are just absurdly limiting, which means you have to create a resource/account, update policies related to whatever you want to do, which then tells you these are _old policies_ and you want to edit new ones, but those are impossible to properly find.
10. Now that we've setup our accounts, our AI tooling, our permissions, we write the code which takes less than all of the previous actions in the list. Now, you want to test it on Android? Well, you can:
- A. Test it with your account by signing in into emulators, be it local or cloud, manually, which means passing 2FA every time if you want to automate this and constantly risking your account security/ban.
- B. Create a google account for testing which you will use, add it to Licensed Testers on the play store, invite it to internal testers, wait for 24-48 hours to be able to use it, then if you try to automate testing, struggle with having to mock a whole Google Account login process which every time uses some non-deterministic logic to show a random pop-up. Then, do the same thing for the purchase process, ending up with a giant script of clicking through the options
11. Congratulations, you made it this far and are able to deploy your app to Beta. Now, find 12 testers to actively use your app for free, continuously for 14 days to prove its not a bad app.
At this point, Google is actively preventing you from shipping at every step, causing more and more issues the deeper down the stack you go.
What stack are you using?
Trying to implement their gRPC api from their specs and protobufs for Live is an exercise in immense frustration and futility. I wanted to call it from Elixir, even with our strong AI I wasted days then gave up.
Some other fun things you'll find:
- The models perform differently when called via the API vs in the Gemini UI.
- The Gemini API will randomly fail about 1% of the time, retry logic is basically mandatory.
- API performance is heavily influenced by the whims of the Google we've observed spreads between 30 seconds and 4 minutes for the same query depending on how Google is feeling that day.