Dubbing quickstart | ElevenLabs Documentation

This guide shows you how to dub a media file into another language with the Dubbing API. In this example you create a dubbing project from an English audio file and generate a Spanish dub.

A dubbing project has two parts: a project, which holds one source of media and its transcript, and one or more language targets, each producing a dubbed output in a single language. You create a project, wait for its source to be transcribed, add a language, then download the finished dub.

Using the Dubbing 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

The Python example uses the requests library to download the dubbed audio. Install it with pip install requests.

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 import os
3 import time
4 import requests
5 from dotenv import load_dotenv
6 from elevenlabs.client import ElevenLabs
7 
8 load_dotenv()
9 
10 elevenlabs = ElevenLabs(
11     api_key=os.getenv("ELEVENLABS_API_KEY"),
12 )
13 
14 # 1. Create a project from a source URL
15 project = elevenlabs.dubbing.project.create(
16     source_url="https://storage.googleapis.com/eleven-public-cdn/audio/marketing/nicole.mp3",
17     source_language="en",
18     reference="Quickstart dub",
19 )
20 
21 # 2. Wait for the source media to be transcribed
22 while True:
23     project = elevenlabs.dubbing.project.get(project.project_id)
24     if project.status == "ready":
25         break
26     if project.status == "failed":
27         raise RuntimeError("Project preparation failed")
28     print("Preparing project...")
29     time.sleep(5)
30 
31 # 3. Add a Spanish language target
32 language = elevenlabs.dubbing.project.language.create(
33     project.project_id,
34     target_language="es",
35 )
36 
37 # 4. Wait for the dub to finish generating
38 while True:
39     language = elevenlabs.dubbing.project.language.get(
40         project.project_id, language.language_id
41     )
42     if language.status == "completed":
43         break
44     if language.status == "failed":
45         raise RuntimeError("Dub generation failed")
46     print("Generating dub...")
47     time.sleep(5)
48 
49 # 5. Download the dubbed audio from the signed URL
50 audio = requests.get(language.outputs.lossless_audio)
51 with open("dubbed.wav", "wb") as f:
52     f.write(audio.content)
53 
54 print("Saved dubbed audio to dubbed.wav")

The download URL in outputs.lossless_audio is signed and expires about an hour after it is issued. Fetch the language again to get a fresh URL if it has expired.

Execute the code

1 python example.py

The dubbed audio is saved to dubbed.wav in your working directory.

Enterprise workspaces can review and correct the source transcript before adding a language, which produces more accurate translations. See Refine and regenerate a dub.

Next steps

Refine and regenerate a dub

Edit the source transcript and translations, then regenerate the dub

Dub into multiple languages

Add several target languages to a single project

API reference

Explore all Dubbing API parameters and response formats