ElevenLabs Tutorial for Beginners: From Sign-Up to First Audio File

Everything a first-time ElevenLabs user needs to know: sign-up, voice selection, settings, generation, download, and long-form content with Projects.

Step 1: Sign Up and Understand the Dashboard

Go to elevenlabs.io and click Sign Up. You can register with a Google account, GitHub, or a standard email and password. Once registered, you're automatically on the free plan — no credit card required. You get 10,000 characters per month to work with from day one.

The dashboard has four main sections in the left navigation:

• Speech — the basic text-to-speech generator. Type text, pick a voice, generate audio.
• Projects — the long-form narration editor for content longer than a few paragraphs (requires Creator plan or above).
• Voices — your voice library where you can browse pre-made voices and manage custom voices you create.
• Studio — additional tools including Dubbing for multilingual content.

Step 2: Choose Your Voice

Click the voice selector in the Speech interface — it's typically showing a default voice name near the text input area. A panel opens showing the voice library. You can filter by:

• Gender
• Age
• Accent
• Use case (narration, news, conversational, etc.)
• Language

With over 1,000 voices in the library, filtering is essential unless you enjoy scrolling indefinitely.

Each voice has a preview button that plays a short sample. Listen to the preview, but don't rely on it too heavily — the preview clip is typically chosen to show the voice at its best, and your content may produce different results.

For general-purpose narration, these voices consistently perform well:

Voice	Accent	Best For
Rachel	American English (warm, natural)	Educational and conversational content
Josh	American English (authoritative)	News-style and documentary
Charlotte	British English (professional)	Corporate and formal content
Liam	American English (clear, energetic)	Marketing and upbeat content

Don't spend more than 15 minutes choosing on your first session — pick one and generate something. Voice selection is iterative.

Step 3: Generate and Download Your First Audio

1. Type or paste your text into the large text field in the Speech interface. The character counter updates as you type to show you the cost of generating this text.
2. Click Generate and wait. For texts under 500 characters, generation typically takes 2–4 seconds. A 2,000-character passage might take 8–15 seconds.
3. When generation completes, the audio player appears below the text field. Hit play to listen.
4. If it sounds good, click the download button (the downward arrow icon) to save the MP3 file.

Default export is MP3 at 128kbps. Higher bitrate options are available in the settings if you need studio-quality files.

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Step 4: Understand Voice Settings

Click the gear or settings icon near the voice selector to access voice settings. Three sliders control the character of your generation:

Stability (0–100%)

Controls how consistent the voice is between different generations of the same text.

• Lower stability = more variation and expressiveness — the voice is more likely to emphasise different parts of the text.
• Higher stability = more predictable, consistent output but can sound flat.

Similarity Boost (0–100%)

Controls how closely the output adheres to the trained voice characteristics.

• For pre-made voices, keep this at 75% or above to prevent drift from the expected voice quality.
• For cloned voices, higher similarity boost helps preserve the specific characteristics that make the clone recognisable.

Style Exaggeration (0–100%)

Turned off by default and should stay that way for most use cases. It amplifies the expressive characteristics of the voice.

Step 5: Long-Form Content with Projects

Try ElevenLabs free — sign up and follow along with this tutorial

The Speech interface is designed for short to medium-length content — individual clips, paragraphs, short scripts. For anything longer than a few hundred words — a full video script, a podcast episode, a book chapter — Projects is the right tool.

Here's how to use Projects:

1. Navigate to Projects in the left sidebar and create a new project.
2. Give it a name that corresponds to your piece of content.
3. Paste your full text. ElevenLabs automatically breaks the text into paragraphs, each shown as a separate segment you can control individually.
4. Listen through the segments. For any that don't sound right, click the regenerate button on that individual segment — only that segment is regenerated, everything else stays intact.
5. Once satisfied with all segments, use the Export button to download the full audio as a single stitched file. Choose MP3 or WAV format and set the export quality.