How to Add AI Video Generation to Your App: API Quickstart

Adding video generation to an app used to mean picking one vendor, learning its specific API, and hard-wiring your product to it. A unified layer like Siray flattens that: one API key, a single request shape across models, and a normalized result back — so your first integration is a matter of picking a model and making a call, not building a custom adapter per vendor. This is the quickstart version: what to decide before you write code, what your first request looks like conceptually, and a checklist for your first week.

Before You Write Any Code

Three decisions shape everything else, and they're worth making before opening an editor:Which model fits your use case? Speed and cost-sensitive prototyping points toward something like LTX 2.3 or Seedance 2.0 Fast; flagship quality with native 4K points toward Kling 3.0 (at a higher price and stricter review); built-in audio points toward Veo 3.1, which renders native sound with no mute option. The full comparison is in Veo vs Kling vs Seedance — don't rebuild that research here, just pick a starting point.What are you starting from? Text-to-video and image-to-video are different jobs. If you're animating existing photos rather than generating from a text prompt, see How to Turn Your Photos into AI Video for that specific path.What output do you actually need? A silent clip is cheaper and faster to iterate on than an audio-native one. Decide this before you pick a model, not after.

Your First Integration, Conceptually

Strip away vendor-specific detail and a first integration has four parts: authenticate with one API key, send a request naming your chosen model and its input, receive a result in a normalized shape, and inspect it before wiring it into your product flow. Siray's documentation frames the access sequence simply as sign up, then use that one key across whichever of its 300+ models you call.

# Illustrative pseudocode — verify exact syntax against the current Siray docs before shipping.response = siray.generate(    model="<model-name>",    input="<your text prompt or image reference>",)video_url = response.output

That's the shape, not the syntax — field names, request format, and response structure should be confirmed against docs.siray.ai before you write real code. The point worth internalizing early: because the request shape is consistent across models, swapping model="<model-name>" for a different one later doesn't require rebuilding this integration from scratch.

Prototype Without Writing Code First (Optional)

If you want to see what a model produces before committing to an integration, the siray-comfyui node (searchable in ComfyUI Manager, repo at github.com/siray-ai/siray-comfyui) lets you run the same hosted models through a visual graph with the same API key — useful for testing prompts and comparing model output before a single line of application code exists.

A First-Week Checklist

• Sign up and get your API key.
• Pick one model for your first test, not the "best" one for every future case.
• Make one request and actually read the raw result, not just whether it returned 200.
• Deliberately trigger one failure case (bad input, unsupported parameter) and see what comes back.
• Decide where the model name lives in your code — ideally configuration, not scattered through business logic — so switching later is cheap.
• Once this is running, read One API for Multiple AI Models for the production-grade version: migration strategy, retry classification, and cost controls.

Key Takeaways

• Siray puts 300+ models behind one API key and a consistent request shape.
• Pick your model, input type, and output needs before writing code — not during.
• A first integration is four parts: authenticate, request, normalized result, inspect.
• Treat this quickstart as step one; the operational playbook for running it at scale is a separate guide.

Start Your First Integration

Create your free Siray account, grab your API key, and make your first video generation call today — the same key works across every model in the catalog as your needs grow.