Text to Dialogue quickstart

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

pip install elevenlabs
pip install python-dotenv

Install the ElevenLabs CLI. Homebrew (macOS) and Scoop (Windows) are recommended.

Homebrew (macOS)

brew install elevenlabs/tap/elevenlabs

Scoop (Windows)

scoop bucket add elevenlabs https://github.com/elevenlabs/scoop-bucket
scoop install elevenlabs

npm

npm install -g @elevenlabs/cli

curl

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/elevenlabs/cli/releases/latest/download/elevenlabs-cli-installer.sh | sh

Working with an AI coding assistant? Run elevenlabs generate-skills in your project to write a SKILL.md for every command group into skills/, so your assistant knows the CLI's full surface without you pasting docs. Use --output-dir to put them elsewhere. This reads the CLI's own embedded API definition, so it needs no API key and works offline — and it stays in step with whichever CLI version you have installed.

Then authenticate — this opens your browser to authorize the CLI:

elevenlabs auth login

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.

# example.py
import os

from dotenv import load_dotenv
from elevenlabs.client import ElevenLabs
from elevenlabs.play import play

load_dotenv()

elevenlabs = ElevenLabs(
  api_key=os.getenv("ELEVENLABS_API_KEY"),
)

audio = elevenlabs.text_to_dialogue.convert(
    inputs=[
        {
            "text": "[cheerfully] Hello, how are you?",
            "voice_id": "9BWtsMINqrJLrRacOk9x",
        },
        {
            "text": "[stuttering] I'm... I'm doing well, thank you.",
            "voice_id": "IKne3meq5aSn9XLyUdCD",
        }
    ]
)

play(audio)

Then run it:

python example.py

You should hear the dialogue audio play.

Pass the dialogue inputs as a JSON array and save the audio to a file:

elevenlabs text-to-dialogue convert \
  --output dialogue.mp3 \
  --inputs '[
    { "text": "[cheerfully] Hello, how are you?", "voice_id": "9BWtsMINqrJLrRacOk9x" },
    { "text": "[stuttering] I... I am doing well, thank you.", "voice_id": "IKne3meq5aSn9XLyUdCD" }
  ]'

Open dialogue.mp3 to hear the result.