Procedures | ElevenLabs Documentation

Procedures are currently in Alpha. See details in Release status.

Overview

A procedure tells your agent how to handle one specific task. Think of your agent’s set of procedures as an employee handbook: each procedure has a trigger that describes situations when it applies and content describing what to do in those situations. When your agent encounters a situation that matches one of the triggers, it loads the relevant procedure.

Use procedures when your agent needs to handle many distinct tasks. One example use case is a customer support agent, where each procedure covers one type of request: refunds, identity verification, account recovery, or connection troubleshooting.

Procedure types

There are two kinds of procedures:

Free-form procedures are written as natural-language instructions the agent interprets and adapts to the situation.
Structured procedures are an ordered list of typed steps the agent runs the same way every time.

You can use both kinds, alongside workflows, on the same agent. The agent picks the relevant procedure from its trigger, regardless of type.

When to use procedures

Every agent has a system prompt. Procedures and workflows are two alternative ways to add structure on top. Pick based on how much the conversation can vary.

Requirement	Use	Why
Simple proof of concept agent	System prompt only	Fastest to set up and iterate on, but a single prompt gets unwieldy as the agent grows in scope.
Task where the agent can adapt wording and order	Free-form procedure	Keeps the whole conversation in one LLM’s context, so the agent adapts wording and order and can follow unexpected turns. Uses more of the context window.
Task whose steps must run the same way every time	Structured procedure	Each step runs in the order you set, the same way every time, and you author it as a short list of steps.
Full control over complex branching and edge cases	Workflow	Runs as a graph of subagents you design and connect yourself, with full control over branching and the model each step uses.

Limitations

A procedure’s content is capped at 50,000 characters.
You cannot convert a procedure from one type to the other.
Free-form procedures can be imported from a document or generated automatically. Structured procedures are built step by step.
Free-form procedures can reference knowledge base documents and other procedures. Structured procedures cannot.

Release status

Procedures are currently in Alpha. Expect the feature set, dashboard controls, and underlying schema to keep evolving before general availability; some changes may be breaking.