ElevenLabs connection
Deployed voice apps work keyless out of the box — or run speech on your own ElevenLabs account.
Keyless by default: the AI gateway
Apps with the AI capability need no ElevenLabs account to deploy. Each deployed environment receives its own short-lived gateway token, and the app's backend sends speech-to-text and text-to-speech to Spaceboy's AI gateway, which forwards them to ElevenLabs on Spaceboy's key. Usage is metered from your organization's prepaid credits, and every request shows up as a line item on the Usage page — the same rail as other platform AI generation.
ChatGPT (the assistant's mind) and ElevenLabs (its voice) are independent: you can bring your own OpenAI key and still run speech through the gateway, or the other way around. Sandboxes never touch the gateway at all: hold-to-talk is simulated there, with no key and no cost.
Connecting your own key
Prefer speech billed by ElevenLabs to your own account? Create an API key at elevenlabs.io (Developers → API keys) and paste it on the ElevenLabs card under Connections — free on every account. Spaceboy stores it in the encrypted secret store and keeps only the last four characters for display. ElevenLabs keys start with sk_ (underscore); OpenAI keys start with sk- (hyphen) — paste each on its own card.
ElevenLabs offers no cheap way to test a credential, so the key is format-checked only — a bad key surfaces as an ElevenLabs error on the deployed app's first voice turn.
What changes
- Deploys of projects with the AI capability inject your key server-side as ELEVENLABS_API_KEY. Speech calls stop using the gateway; ChatGPT still uses it unless you also connect OpenAI. Redeploy an environment to pick up a newly connected key.
- Speech usage bills to your ElevenLabs account at ElevenLabs' rates; nothing is debited from your Spaceboy credits for those calls.
- The key never reaches the browser, the app's users, or the agent's shell — it goes straight into the deployed environment's runtime configuration.
- Use Connection defaults on the card to point different projects — or development versus production — at different keys, such as a low-limit key for development.