Troubleshooting Common Problems

Find the section matching the symptom you're seeing.

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1. Prompt-Type Problems (Error Prompts Appear)

"Insufficient credit balance"

Both granted and top-up credits are used up. Three options:

1. Top up — from $5, yielding 3,800 credits, valid 1 year.
2. Switch to a cheaper voice — the cheapest and most expensive tiers differ by ~42×. Tencent Premium and Baidu Basic cost just 5 credits/1,000 chars; the Doubao small model ~4. See the eight brands overview.
3. Enter your own API key — runs through your own account, zero credits deducted.

First confirm you didn't pick the wrong tier: check "~N credits / 1,000 chars" in TTS Settings. If it shows 104 or 209, you've selected some of the site's most expensive tiers.

"Commercial system API requires upgrading to Pro"

Cloud AI voices require an active subscription. Three options:

• Subscribe to any tier (how to choose)
• Use system built-in voice — free, unlimited, no login needed
• Enter your own API key

"Please log in" / "Please log in again" / "The account on the current page doesn't match the logged-in session"

The third one is the most confusing: it means the account shown on your page doesn't match the account the login credential corresponds to. It commonly happens after using multi-account switching, or after the login state expires.

The fix is the same either way: log out, then log back in.

"A single piece of text can't exceed N characters"

• Reading: 500 chars per request (4,000 with your own key). Normally Soniva auto-segments, so this error shouldn't appear — if it does, the text likely has an extra-long unpunctuated stretch that can't be split. Add a few punctuation marks or line breaks manually.
• Translation: 3,000 chars per request on the free tier, 20,000 for subscribers. Just send it in segments.

"Requests are too frequent"

You've hit the rate limit (10/min for translation, 20/min with your own key). Wait a minute and try again.

"This month's subscription translation quota is used up"

Translation quota is counted separately per brand. Switch to another translation brand (DeepSeek / Alibaba Cloud / Volcano Ark / Zhipu GLM) to draw on that brand's quota, or enter your own key. See the translation guide.

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2. Clicking Does Nothing / No Sound

Troubleshoot in this order:

1. Check whether the tab is muted in your browser — right-click the tab and see if there's an "unmute" option.
2. Check system volume and output device — especially with headphones or a Bluetooth speaker connected.
3. Try a different voice — e.g. switch from the current voice to system built-in voice. If system voice works but cloud voices don't, the problem is on the network or upstream side, not your device.
4. Refresh the page.

You normally shouldn't have zero sound at all: Soniva has three-level failover — a failing cloud voice auto-falls back to the Alibaba Cloud fallback voice, then to your device's system voice. So "completely silent" is usually a device/browser-side issue, not Soniva's.

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3. The Voice Suddenly Changed

That's three-level failover triggering, not a bug. Your chosen cloud voice's request failed (upstream timeout, rate limit, or temporary outage), and Soniva auto-switched to a fallback voice to make sure you can finish listening.

Try again in a few minutes, or switch brands.

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4. Pauses Midway Through Long Text

Text over the per-request cap is auto-split into multiple segments and read in sequence, with an extremely short seam between segments. It becomes noticeable when the upstream responds slowly.

To reduce pauses: enter your own API key (per-request cap rises from 500 to 4,000 chars — 8× fewer segments), or avoid the Doubao small model (only 280 chars per segment — the finest cuts).

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5. Credits Deducted Differ Than Expected

Look at these three most common causes first:

1. You picked a more expensive tier than you thought. Especially Tencent Cloud — its voice list defaults to putting the most expensive Super-Natural tier first, so tapping the first one is 104 credits/1,000 chars, while scrolling down to a 101-prefixed Premium voice is just 5.
2. MiniMax counts a CJK character as 2. The only brand that does this site-wide.
3. Baidu and Doubao's small model bill per call. When reading very short content, the converted "per-1,000-char unit price" is higher than the rate table — that's a property of per-call billing. The longer you read, the closer it gets to the table's figure.

Every deduction can be inspected in the credit ledger.

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6. History Disappeared After Switching Device/Browser

First, confirm you're logged in. Session sync requires login (but not a subscription). When logged out, sessions exist only in the current browser locally — switch browsers and they're gone.

If you're logged in but still can't see them, see account & sync.

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7. Network-Related

If it prompts a network connection failure or timeout:

• Check whether a firewall/proxy is blocking the third-party speech API domains
• Corporate/campus networks often have such restrictions — try another network
• International brands (ElevenLabs / Microsoft / Cartesia) are more prone to timeouts in some network environments; switch to a domestic brand first to verify whether it's a network issue

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Still Not Resolved

Email soniva.cde@gmail.com, and include:

• What you were doing (reading / translation / top-up…)
• The brand and voice you selected
• The full error-prompt text (a screenshot is best)
• The approximate time it happened

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Related Documents

• Account & Sync
• Data & Privacy
• How to Read Your Credit Ledger
• Long-Text Reading