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How to Connect n8n to ElevenLabs: Automate AI Voice Generation (2025)

Rodrigo Ferreira

— 2 min read

ElevenLabs produces the most natural AI voices available today, and n8n lets you call it on autopilot — turning articles, alerts, scripts, or database rows into finished audio without touching a recording app. This guide shows you exactly how to wire the two together.

What you'll need

  • An ElevenLabs account and API key (found under Profile → API Key).
  • A running n8n instance (cloud or self-hosted).
  • A destination for the audio — Google Drive, S3, Telegram, or an email node.

Step 1: Add your ElevenLabs API key to n8n

ElevenLabs does not ship with a dedicated n8n node yet, so you'll use the HTTP Request node — which is a strength, because it gives you access to every ElevenLabs endpoint. First, store your key as a credential: create a Header Auth credential with the header name xi-api-key and your key as the value. This keeps the secret out of your workflow JSON.

Step 2: Build the text-to-speech request

Add an HTTP Request node configured like this:

  • Method: POST
  • URL: https://api.elevenlabs.io/v1/text-to-speech/{voice_id}
  • Authentication: your Header Auth credential
  • Body (JSON): { "text": "{{ $json.text }}", "model_id": "eleven_multilingual_v2" }
  • Response format: set to File so n8n captures the returned MP3 as binary data.

Grab your voice_id from the ElevenLabs Voice Library — each voice has a unique ID you drop straight into the URL.

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Step 3: Do something with the audio

Because the response comes back as a binary file, you can pipe it directly into:

  • Google Drive / Dropbox / S3 to archive every generated clip.
  • Telegram or WhatsApp to send a voice message.
  • Gmail as an attachment.
  • A podcast host via their upload API.

Real workflows you can build

  • Newsletter → podcast: trigger on a new post, send the body to ElevenLabs, upload the MP3 as an episode.
  • AI-narrated alerts: convert critical Slack or monitoring alerts into a spoken message.
  • Faceless video voiceovers: generate narration for YouTube Shorts or Reels automatically.
  • Multilingual audio: run the same text through different voices to produce localized versions in one workflow.

Tips to keep costs and quality in check

  • ElevenLabs bills by characters — trim boilerplate before sending text to the API.
  • Use the eleven_turbo models for low-latency, high-volume jobs and the multilingual_v2 model when quality matters most.
  • Add a Wait or batching step if you are generating hundreds of clips to stay under rate limits.
  • Cache generated audio (e.g., in a database keyed by text hash) so you never pay twice for the same script.

Ready to automate? Grab the done-for-you ElevenLabs audio pipeline and publish your first AI episode today. Get this template on Gumroad →

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