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

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

Create a new file named example.py or example.mts, depending on your language of choice and add the following code:

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

Execute the code

1 python example.py

You should hear the dialogue audio play.

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