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# Exa

## Overview

Connect your ElevenLabs AI agents with Exa to perform semantic web searches during conversations. Your agents can find relevant web content, research topics, and retrieve up-to-date information — with optional filtering by category (news, research papers, companies, GitHub, LinkedIn, and more), domain, and date range.

## Capabilities

| Capability                | Support                                    |
| ------------------------- | ------------------------------------------ |
| Zero retention mode (ZRM) | Not supported                              |
| Attachments in tools      | Not supported — tools operate on text only |

## Setup

This integration uses an **Exa API key** for authentication.

#### Create an Exa account

Sign up at [exa.ai](https://exa.ai) if you do not already have an account.

#### Get your API key

Navigate to your [Exa Dashboard API Keys page](https://dashboard.exa.ai/api-keys) and copy your API key.

#### Connect in ElevenLabs

In the ElevenLabs integration setup, paste your Exa API key in the **API Key** field.

## Search options

The integration exposes several parameters that control how searches are performed.

### Categories

Searches can optionally be scoped to a content category, which focuses results on a specific type of source. Below are some example categories — refer to the [Exa documentation](https://docs.exa.ai) for the full set of supported categories:

| Category         | What it covers                 |
| ---------------- | ------------------------------ |
| `company`        | Company pages and metadata     |
| `research paper` | Academic and scientific papers |
| `news`           | Current events and journalism  |
| `github`         | GitHub repositories and code   |
| `tweet`          | Posts on X (Twitter)           |

### Content retrieval

Each search result returns highlights by default. The agent can optionally request additional content types, which control what else is extracted from the page:

* **Highlights** (default) — the most relevant text snippets from the page, sized by Exa. Token-efficient and suitable for most use cases.
* **Text** — the full page text. Request when you need complete content rather than just the relevant parts.
* **Summary** — an LLM-generated summary of the page. Higher latency than the other options.

### Filtering

Results can be further narrowed by including or excluding specific domains, and by filtering to a published date range (ISO 8601).

## Useful links

* [Exa API documentation](https://exa.ai/docs/reference/search-api-guide)
* [Exa Dashboard](https://dashboard.exa.ai)

> ElevenLabs provides APIs and SDKs for text to speech, voice cloning, speech to text, sound effects, voice isolator, voice changer, and conversational AI agents. Build voice-enabled applications with lifelike audio generation.