Text to Dialogue quickstart | ElevenLabs Documentation

This guide will show you how to generate immersive, natural-sounding dialogue from text using the Text to Dialogue API.

Keep the total length of all inputs[].text values at or below 2,000 characters per request for reliable generation. Split longer scripts into chunks and stitch the audio client-side.

Using the Text to Dialogue API

Create an API key

Create an API key in the dashboard here, which you’ll use to securely access the API.

Store the key as a managed secret and pass it to the SDKs either as a environment variable via an .env file, or directly in your app’s configuration depending on your preference.

.env

1 ELEVENLABS_API_KEY=<your_api_key_here>

Install the SDK

SDK

CLI

We’ll also use the dotenv library to load our API key from an environment variable.

1 pip install elevenlabs
2 pip install python-dotenv

Make the API request

SDK

CLI

Create a new file named example.py or example.mts, depending on your language of choice, and add the following code. Add audio tags inside each text value to guide that speaker’s delivery. The voice_id selects the speaker voice for the same input item.

1 # example.py
2 import os
3 
4 from dotenv import load_dotenv
5 from elevenlabs.client import ElevenLabs
6 from elevenlabs.play import play
7 
8 load_dotenv()
9 
10 elevenlabs = ElevenLabs(
11   api_key=os.getenv("ELEVENLABS_API_KEY"),
12 )
13 
14 audio = elevenlabs.text_to_dialogue.convert(
15     inputs=[
16         {
17             "text": "[cheerfully] Hello, how are you?",
18             "voice_id": "9BWtsMINqrJLrRacOk9x",
19         },
20         {
21             "text": "[stuttering] I'm... I'm doing well, thank you.",
22             "voice_id": "IKne3meq5aSn9XLyUdCD",
23         }
24     ]
25 )
26 
27 play(audio)

Then run it:

1 python example.py

You should hear the dialogue audio play.

WebSocket streaming

For incremental dialogue over a long-lived connection with Eleven v3 models, follow Realtime Text to Dialogue. To compare this WebSocket with the standard TTS WebSocket, see Text to Speech vs Text to Dialogue WebSockets.

Next steps

Browse voices

Explore 10,000+ voices to assign to each dialogue speaker

Text to Speech

Generate speech from a single voice with the Text to Speech API

API reference

Explore all Text to Dialogue parameters and response formats