ElevenLabs Text-to-Speech

Generate high-quality speech audio from text using the ElevenLabs API.

Authentication

The API key is available as environment variable:

ELEVENLABS_API_KEY

Include in request header:

xi-api-key: $ELEVENLABS_API_KEY

API Endpoints

Text-to-Speech

POST https://api.elevenlabs.io/v1/text-to-speech/{voice_id}

Request Body:

{
  "text": "Your text here",
  "model_id": "eleven_turbo_v2_5",
  "voice_settings": {
    "stability": 0.5,
    "similarity_boost": 0.5
  }
}

Response: Audio bytes (mp3 format by default)

Popular Voice IDs

• 21m00Tcm4TlvDq8ikWAM - Rachel (female, calm)
• EXAVITQu4vr4xnSDxMaL - Bella (female, soft)
• ErXwobaYiN019PkySvjV - Antoni (male, warm)
• TxGEqnHWrfWFTfGW9XjX - Josh (male, deep)

Python Example

import os
import requests

ELEVENLABS_API_KEY = os.environ.get("ELEVENLABS_API_KEY")
VOICE_ID = "21m00Tcm4TlvDq8ikWAM"  # Rachel

def text_to_speech(text, output_path):
    url = f"https://api.elevenlabs.io/v1/text-to-speech/{VOICE_ID}"

    headers = {
        "xi-api-key": ELEVENLABS_API_KEY,
        "Content-Type": "application/json"
    }

    data = {
        "text": text,
        "model_id": "eleven_turbo_v2_5",
        "voice_settings": {
            "stability": 0.5,
            "similarity_boost": 0.75
        }
    }

    response = requests.post(url, json=data, headers=headers)

    if response.status_code == 200:
        with open(output_path, "wb") as f:
            f.write(response.content)
        return True
    else:
        print(f"Error: {response.status_code} - {response.text}")
        return False

Handling Long Text

ElevenLabs has a ~5000 character limit per request. For long documents:

1. Split text into chunks at sentence boundaries
2. Generate audio for each chunk
3. Concatenate using ffmpeg or pydub:

# Create file list
echo "file 'chunk1.mp3'" > files.txt
echo "file 'chunk2.mp3'" >> files.txt

# Concatenate
ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i files.txt -c copy output.mp3

Best Practices

• Split at sentence boundaries to avoid cutting words
• Check rate limits (varies by subscription tier)
• Cache generated audio to avoid redundant API calls