Director Notes with ElevenLabs

Give your avatar more expression with cues that follow the agent’s voice. Start with a working session from the three-step quickstart, then add Director Notes. Director Notes give the avatar a baseline performance style and temporary expression cues. The server route starts with the warm preset at 0.5 expressivity. Expressivity accepts values from 0 to 1; higher values strengthen both the active style and speech-driven motion.

Director Notes are in beta and only work with Cara 4 avatars. Use a Cara 4 avatar ID and set avatarModel to "cara-4", as shown in the server route.

Select Eleven v4 Turbo (eleven_v4_turbo) in the ElevenLabs Agent Voice settings. Eleven v4 and v3 Conversational also support audio tags. Add a short rule to the agent’s system prompt:

Use ElevenLabs audio tags sparingly when the delivery should change.
For testing, use tags such as [excited], [laughs], [whispers], [sighs],
[gasps], [angrily], [sarcastic], or [nervous].
Place each tag immediately before the words it should affect.
Do not explain or read the tags aloud.

ElevenLabs uses the same audio tags for v3 and v4, including v4 Turbo. Anam recognizes the following provider tags and maps each group to one Director Note cue:

Director Note cue	Recognized ElevenLabs tags
`happy`	`[excited]`, `[happily]`, `[cheerfully]`, `[elated]`
`laughter`	`[laugh]`, `[laughs]`, `[laughing]`, `[laughs harder]`, `[starts laughing]`, `[chuckles]`, `[chuckling]`, `[giggles]`, `[giggling]`
`warm`	`[whispers]`, `[whispering]`, `[quietly]`
`playful`	`[sarcastic]`, `[playfully]`
`curious`	`[curiously]`, `[quizzical]`, `[quizzically]`
`concerned`	`[sigh]`, `[sighs]`, `[exhales]`
`sad`	`[sadly]`, `[sorrowful]`, `[tearful]`, `[crying]`
`surprised`	`[gasp]`, `[gasps]`, `[startled]`
`angry`	`[angrily]`, `[furious]`, `[intensely]`
`distressed`	`[nervous]`, `[fearful]`, `[scared]`

This table is the complete alias list that Anam recognizes. ElevenLabs supports other audio tags, but Anam does not map them to Director Notes. A recognized tag is removed from the transcript before it reaches the browser. An unknown bracketed tag remains ordinary transcript text. To see whether the engine recognized and applied a tag, listen for DIRECTOR_NOTE_CUE_APPLIED in the step 3 component:

// In the component body
const [directorNoteActivity, setDirectorNoteActivity] = useState<{
  cueTag: string;
  correlationId: string;
} | null>(null);

// Inside start(), with the other listeners
anamClient.addListener(AnamEvent.DIRECTOR_NOTE_CUE_APPLIED, (evt) => {
  setDirectorNoteActivity({
    cueTag: evt.cueTag,
    correlationId: evt.correlationId,
  });
});

// In the returned JSX
{directorNoteActivity && <p>Last cue: {directorNoteActivity.cueTag}</p>}

The event contains the normalized Anam cue. For example, ElevenLabs [laughs] produces a laughter cue, while [whispers] produces warm. The Anam Director Notes guide covers baseline styles, expressivity, cue events, and Cara 4 requirements.

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Director Notes with ElevenLabs

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