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KugelAudio has a built-in Cognigy Voice Gateway custom-vendor endpoint — no proxy server needed. Register KugelAudio once as a speech service in Cognigy’s Self-Service Portal, then select it in your flows.
Cognigy’s built-in ElevenLabs provider is hosted-only and has no custom base-URL field, so it cannot be pointed at KugelAudio. Add KugelAudio as a custom speech vendor instead, as described below.

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Setup

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1. Get your KugelAudio API key and a voice ID

  • API key — open the KugelAudio dashboard, then go to Settings → API Keys.
  • Voice ID — open the KugelAudio dashboard, go to Voices, pick a voice, and copy its ID. The numeric ID or the voice handle both work.

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2. Add KugelAudio as a speech service

In the Cognigy Voice Gateway Self-Service Portal, go to Speech → Add speech service and choose a custom vendor.
1

Name the vendor

Pick any name, for example kugelaudio. You’ll use this name to select the vendor in your flows.
2

Set the TTS HTTP URL

Cognigy appends /synthesize/<vendor-name> to this URL automatically — enter the base URL exactly as shown, without a trailing path.
3

Set the Authentication Token

Paste your KugelAudio API key. Cognigy sends it as an Authorization: Bearer header, which KugelAudio authenticates on every request.
4

Set the voice

Enter the voice ID from step 1.
5

Enable text-to-speech

Turn on Use for text-to-speech. Leave Use for speech-to-text off — this endpoint provides TTS only.
6

Enable streaming (recommended)

Turn on Enable text-to-speech streaming so audio starts playing while it is still being generated, instead of after the whole utterance is synthesized.
7

Choose the account scope

Select which Cognigy accounts may use this vendor, then save.

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3. Select the vendor in your flow

Registering the vendor does not switch your flow over on its own. Set the vendor name in the Custom parameter of the relevant nodes — Set Session Config, Say, Question, Optional Question, or Session Speech Parameters Config.
If you skip this step the flow keeps using whichever provider it used before, and nothing appears to change.

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Verify your API key first

If synthesis fails, check the key on its own before changing anything in Cognigy:
200 means the key is good. 401 Invalid API key means the key is wrong, truncated, or from a different environment — a KugelAudio project key looks like sk-kug-proj_lu_… and is long, so a partial copy-paste is the usual cause.

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How it works

Cognigy sends one POST per utterance:
encoding and sample_rate are sent only when TTS streaming is enabled on the vendor, and they select how the audio comes back: Language tags are BCP-47 (de-DE, en-US). KugelAudio uses the language part and ignores the region, so de-DE and de-AT both select German. See Voices for the languages each voice supports.

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Audio format

Supported sample rates are 8000, 16000, 22050, 24000, and 44100. Cognigy Voice Gateway requests 8000 for streaming telephony audio.

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Limits

Each organization has a rate limit and a cap on concurrent generations. A live phone deployment can hold several calls open at once, so the concurrency cap is usually the one that matters — when it is exceeded, synthesis is rejected with 429 RATE_LIMITED and the caller hears nothing. Check your organization’s limits in the dashboard before going live, and contact us if you need them raised for production traffic. See Error codes for the exact responses.

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Regions

To keep traffic and data inside the EU, use the regional endpoint instead:
See Regions for the full list of endpoints.

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Troubleshooting

Every error response carries a readable message, which Cognigy records in its logs:
See Error codes for the full list.