Fair, it wouldn't work well for on-demand generation in an app, but for ad-hoc cases like a voice-over it's not a huge expense.
If OpenAI decides to fully ignore ethics and dive deep into voice cloning, then all bets are off.
I agree. I'm wondering if it is possible to disable output streaming of audio and just get the text response event.
It seems so.
The configuration of the session accepts a parameter (modalities) that could restrict the response only to text. See it in https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/realtime-clie....
That is substantially more expensive than TTS (text-to-speech) which already is quite expensive.