ElevenLabs Skills: Ten Voice AI Capabilities Ready to Load in Claude Code and Codex

What ElevenLabs Skills Is and Who Uses It

ElevenLabs Skills is not an SDK or a runtime library. It is a repository of structured instructions, one per ElevenLabs capability, packaged according to the Agent Skills specification maintained at agentskills.io. When an AI coding assistant loads a skill, it learns what that capability does, what inputs it takes, which SDK call or CLI command to invoke, and what output to expect. The developer does not need to write that context manually.

The primary audience is developers who already use ElevenLabs for voice features and who work inside a compatible AI coding assistant such as Claude Code or Codex. The repository covers ten distinct ElevenLabs API surfaces: text-to-speech, speech-to-text, speech-engine for real-time conversation, agent building, sound-effects generation, music generation, voice-changer, voice-isolator, dubbing, and API key setup.

The repository does not provide its own Python or JavaScript client code. It delegates those calls to the official ElevenLabs SDKs and CLI.

How Agent Skills Connect to AI Coding Assistants

The Agent Skills specification defines a standard format for packaging AI assistant instructions as reusable modules. Each skill in this repository is a folder containing a description, parameter definitions, and examples that tell the assistant how to use a specific ElevenLabs capability correctly.

All ten skills share one prerequisite: an ElevenLabs API key. The README specifies setting it as an environment variable:

export ELEVENLABS_API_KEY="your-api-key"

The .env.example file in the repository confirms the variable name:

ELEVENLABS_API_KEY=your_api_key_here

A key obtained through the `setup-api-key` skill, or directly from the ElevenLabs dashboard at elevenlabs.io/app/settings/api-keys, satisfies this requirement across all ten skills.

The README includes an explicit warning about package names: always use `@elevenlabs/elevenlabs-js` for JavaScript and TypeScript, not `elevenlabs`, which is an outdated v1.x package. This distinction matters because the two have different APIs.

Installing ElevenLabs Skills and Setting Up the SDKs

The repository is installed through the `npx skills` toolchain, not through pip or npm directly:

npx skills add elevenlabs/skills

Most skills include examples for three SDKs. For Python:

pip install elevenlabs

For JavaScript and TypeScript (note the correct package name):

npm install @elevenlabs/elevenlabs-js

For the CLI, which reads `ELEVENLABS_API_KEY` automatically and wraps the REST API:

npm install -g @elevenlabs/cli

Alternatively on macOS:

brew install elevenlabs/tap/elevenlabs

Full setup instructions including migration from deprecated packages are documented in each skill's `references/` folder. The README directs new users there for complete per-skill setup detail.

The Ten Skills and Their Scope

The text-to-speech skill converts text to speech using ElevenLabs AI voices. The speech-to-text skill transcribes audio files and returns text with timestamps, making it suitable for processing meeting recordings or uploaded media. The speech-engine skill adds real-time voice conversations to a custom LLM or chat agent, covering the case where a developer needs to swap in their own model backend behind a voice interface. The agents skill is for building full conversational voice AI agents on the ElevenLabs platform.

The sound-effects skill generates audio effects from text descriptions. The music skill produces music tracks using AI composition. The voice-changer skill transforms the voice in an existing audio recording into a target voice, a capability the README describes as speech-to-speech. The voice-isolator skill removes background noise and isolates vocals or speech from an audio file, which is useful for cleaning up recordings before transcription.

The dubbing skill translates audio or video into other languages while preserving the original speakers' voice characteristics, covering 57 or more languages according to the README. The setup-api-key skill guides the user through obtaining and configuring an ElevenLabs API key, making it a practical starting point for developers new to the platform.

The repository stores evaluations in the `evals/` directory. Functional evaluations test whether each skill produces correct output and require approximately 15 minutes to run. Trigger evaluations test whether skills activate for the right queries and take about 3 minutes. Both evaluation types require the Cursor Agent CLI, which must be authenticated before the suite can run.

Running the Evaluation Suite

The `evals/` directory contains trigger and functional evaluations for all ten skills. Running the full suite requires the Cursor Agent CLI (`cursor-agent` on the PATH) and Cursor authentication. To run all evaluations with verbose output:

python3 evals/run_all.py -v

Trigger evaluations alone run faster:

python3 evals/run_all.py --trigger-only -v

Results are saved to `evals/results/<timestamp>/` with a `report.md` summary and a `results.json` file for programmatic access. Functional evaluations use an isolated `cursor-agent` workspace per test case and do not modify the skill source directories.

Limitations and What the Package Does Not Provide

ElevenLabs Skills requires a compatible AI coding assistant. Developers who do not use Claude Code, Codex, or another assistant that implements the Agent Skills specification at agentskills.io cannot use this package at all. The README does not list which assistant versions are supported, and the Agent Skills specification at agentskills.io is still relatively new, so compatibility is not guaranteed across all tool updates.

The package does not include any client-side audio processing, local voice cloning, or offline mode. Every skill makes network calls to the ElevenLabs API, which means an active internet connection and a funded ElevenLabs account are required at runtime. The README does not document rate limits, per-call pricing, or quota behaviour, so developers must check those details on the ElevenLabs dashboard independently.

The repository has no formal GitHub releases. The last push was on 2026-09-25. There is no versioned release to pin against, which means the skill definitions can change without a semver bump. The `evals/` directory requires the Cursor Agent CLI for execution, introducing a dependency on Cursor authentication that may not fit all CI environments.

Alternatives and When to Choose One

The ElevenLabs Python SDK (`pip install elevenlabs`) and the JavaScript SDK (`npm install @elevenlabs/elevenlabs-js`) are the direct alternatives for developers who prefer to write integration code themselves rather than loading assistant skills. Both SDKs provide the same API coverage and do not require an AI coding assistant to operate. They also give more control over error handling, retry logic, and streaming behaviour than a skill abstraction allows.

For teams using a different voice API, AWS Polly offers TTS and transcription through AWS infrastructure, which differs from ElevenLabs in deployment model (cloud-managed rather than API-key-per-request) and voice characteristics. ElevenLabs Skills is strictly tied to ElevenLabs accounts and has no direct AWS Polly or Google Cloud Text-to-Speech equivalent in this repository.

The MIT license permits modification and redistribution of the skill definitions. The repository is not archived and was last updated on 2026-09-25. Teams that want to extend the collection can write additional skills following the Agent Skills specification format and contribute them to the repository.

Editorial conclusion

Developers who build voice features on top of ElevenLabs and use Claude Code or Codex as their coding assistant will save setup time by loading these skills directly. Teams not using a compatible AI coding assistant, or those who prefer to write their own API integration from scratch, gain nothing from this package. The first thing to verify is whether your assistant version supports the Agent Skills specification at agentskills.io.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. elevenlabs/skills on GitHub
2. Issues
3. License: MIT
4. Project website
5. README