Getting a Soniox API key
Soniox is the service that turns your speech into text — it does the listening, in any of the 60 languages. It is the provider we recommend, and this is the whole setup: an account, a little credit, one key, pasted into Vito once.
Budget about five minutes. You will need an email address and a payment method; Soniox is prepaid, so the account needs a balance before it will transcribe anything.
Creating the key
- Sign up at console.soniox.com. Whether new accounts get trial credit is not something Soniox states on their pricing page, so plan on adding a small amount yourself. If you would rather try before paying anything at all, AssemblyAI gives new accounts free credit and you can always switch later.
- Open the billing section and add credit. Add a payment method and top up a small amount — a few euros covers many hours of speech. While you are there, look for the spending limit and set one; the reasons are below and it is far easier to do now than to remember later.
-
Go to the API keys section and create a key. Give it a
name you will recognise later, such as
vito, so you can tell at a glance what it is for. - Copy the key straight away. Providers show a key once, in full, at the moment you create it. After that you can see it exists but not what it says. If you lose it, you delete it and make another — no harm done, but easier avoided.
- Paste it into Vito. Settings → Speech recognition, choose Soniox, paste. Vito will tell you whether the key works before you rely on it.
Prefer to read it from the source?
Soniox documents the console and its pricing themselves at soniox.com/docs. If a screen here does not match what you see, theirs is the authority — consoles get redesigned, and this page will lag behind.
What it costs
Soniox bills per amount of audio you send, not per month. Combined with the cleanup step, dictating through Vito works out at roughly €0.15 per hour of speech — an hour of talking every working day lands somewhere around three euros a month.
At the time of writing Soniox lists $0.10 per hour for recorded audio and $0.12 per hour for real-time, across 60+ languages. That makes it the cheaper of the two speech engines Vito supports, which is the main reason it is the recommended one.
Checked on the Soniox pricing page in July 2026. Prices move; theirs is the number that counts, not ours.
Looking after your key
This part is the same whichever provider you picked, and it is worth two minutes. None of it is paperwork: a key that gets out is somebody else spending your money.
Treat it like a password, because that is what it is
Anyone holding your key can make requests that you pay for. Don't paste it into a chat, a forum post, a bug report or a screenshot, and never commit it to a repository — bots scan public code for keys and find them within minutes.
Set a spending limit before you start using it
All three providers let you cap what the account can spend in a month, or warn you at a threshold. This is the most effective protection you have and it takes a minute to set. With a limit in place, a mistake costs you the limit instead of the balance.
Keep a little credit on the account
These are prepaid services. Run the balance to zero and transcription simply stops working — usually with an unhelpful error. Topping up a small amount and setting a low-balance alert saves you diagnosing a problem that isn't one.
Most providers also offer an automatic top-up: when the balance drops below an amount you choose, they charge your card for another fixed amount. Worth switching on. It is the difference between dictation that always works and dictation that stops on a Tuesday morning because you forgot to log in somewhere three weeks ago.
Automatic top-up needs the spending limit, not instead of it
The two belong together. A top-up that refills on its own, with no ceiling above it, is a bucket with the tap left running: whatever goes wrong keeps being paid for. Set the monthly limit first, then let the top-up keep you under it.
Make a key that only Vito uses
If you already use the same provider for something else, create a separate key rather than reusing one. It costs nothing, it tells you from the provider's usage page what Vito actually spends, and if you ever need to revoke it you won't break anything else in the process.
If it leaks, revoke it
Deleting a key at the provider makes it useless immediately — there is no grace period to worry about and no way for anyone to keep using it. Create a fresh one, paste that into Vito, and carry on. Rotating a key is a two-minute job, so do it at the first suspicion rather than waiting for certainty.
The bill is yours
You are the account holder. The provider bills you directly, at their prices, for whatever the key is used for. Vito is not a middleman: it holds no account on your behalf, never sees your usage, and cannot cap, refund or dispute anything. Which also means the savings are yours — nobody is taking a cut — but so is the responsibility.
Where Vito keeps it
On your own machine, in Vito's settings, and it is sent only to the provider it belongs to. Nobody at Vito can read it. That is the point, and it has one consequence worth knowing: nobody can recover it for you either. Lose it and you make a new one.
If something doesn't work
Vito says the key is invalid
Nine times out of ten it is a copying problem — a missing character at the start, or a trailing space picked up by the selection. Delete what you pasted, copy again, and make sure nothing else is selected. If it still fails, make a fresh key; that is faster than debugging the old one.
It worked yesterday and stopped today
Check the balance first. A prepaid account that has run dry usually reports an authentication or quota error rather than saying plainly that it is empty.
The transcript is in the wrong language
That is a Vito setting rather than a Soniox one — pick your dictation language in Vito's settings.
After this
Soniox handles the listening. The tidying up — removing the "uhs", restructuring sentences, adding line breaks — is a separate step, and needs its own key.