Setup Guide · The Boss
ElevenLabs makes a copy of your voice. The Boss writes your podcast episodes and ElevenLabs reads them in your voice — so you publish a weekly show without ever recording one. You do this once, and it takes about half an hour.
You need a paid plan. There's no way round it, and here's why.
You need this for two separate reasons, and the free plan fails both:
Voice cloning requires a paid plan. The free tier can't make a copy of your voice at all, which is the entire point.
The free tier gives you no commercial-use rights. Publishing a podcast is commercial use. Starter is the minimum that permits it.
Five or six dollars a month, and it's what turns a written script into a published episode in your own voice. Don't try to work around it — the free tier genuinely cannot do this.
One recording. Get this right and everything after it sounds like you.
No air conditioning, no fan, no traffic, no television in another room. ElevenLabs copies whatever it hears — background hum gets baked into every episode you ever publish.
The minimum is one to three minutes, but three to five gives a noticeably better clone. This is a one-time cost for a permanent result — spend the extra two minutes.
Read something in the voice you'd actually use with a client. Not a performance, not your radio voice. Talk the way you'd explain something across a desk. Read a page of one of your own articles if you need material.
Don't move closer and further away. Don't shout or whisper. Steady, natural, the way you talk.
ElevenLabs makes you read a short phrase out loud to prove the voice is actually yours. This is a legal safeguard, not a hurdle — it's the same protection that stops someone else cloning you.
The Boss needs this to know which voice is yours.
It's a long string of letters and numbers. The name is what you see; the ID is what the software uses. Paste it somewhere safe.
Your library shows ElevenLabs' own stock voices alongside your clone. They look similar in the list. If you pick a stock voice by mistake, your podcast publishes in a stranger's voice — and it will sound completely convincing, so nobody catches it until a listener does.
One value, shown once.
Type that address into your browser — don't hunt through menus for it. ElevenLabs has moved this screen more than once, and different guides on the internet describe three different routes to it. The address always works.
You'll need to be signed in. If it asks you to log in, do that and the page will load.
If you'd rather find it by menu instead: your account settings.
Give it a name so you recognise it later — The Boss is fine. Then click Create.
Do this before you close the window or click anything else.
If you close that window without copying it, you cannot get it back — you have to delete it and make a new one. Copy first, then carry on.
If you paste a key into a notes app, some apps helpfully capitalise the first letter. That silently breaks the key, and the only error you'll ever see is a meaningless "unauthorized".
This has already caught the most technical person on this team. Check the first character before you paste it anywhere.
Two minutes, and then you're done forever.
The Boss checks the key against ElevenLabs before it stores anything. If the key is wrong it refuses the save rather than saving something broken — so a successful save means it genuinely works.
Once the key is accepted, The Boss loads your voices. Choose your clone, not a stock voice. If you're unsure, match it against the voice ID you copied in Stage 3.
From here on The Boss writes each episode, you read the script and approve it, and ElevenLabs reads it in your voice. You are never on a microphone again.
The only things that stop this working later are an expired card on your ElevenLabs account, or someone regenerating the API key. If your episodes ever stop appearing, check those two first.
Next: Buzzsprout, which is where the finished episodes actually get published to Apple and Spotify.