THIS WEEK’S BRIEF
AI Voice Is Getting Good. Here's What That Actually Means.
I've been doing voiceover work for 25 years. I've recorded in closets, studios, and living rooms. I've voiced everything from national TV spots to corporate explainers to audiobooks. So when I tell you AI voice has gotten genuinely impressive, I need you to understand - that's not a small thing for me to say.
And yet.
Here's what I'm seeing in the market right now: companies are reaching for AI voiceover the same way they reached for stock photography in 2005. It's fast, it's cheap, it's good enough. And for a lot of applications - internal training videos, quick explainers, content at scale - it probably is good enough.
But "good enough" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
The firms I work with - wealth managers, law practices, consultancies - are not selling commodity services. They're selling trust. They're asking prospective clients to hand over their legal matters, their retirement assets, their company's future. In that context, "good enough" is a brand decision, whether you think of it that way or not.
To me, AI voice sounds like AI voice. Not always, not obviously, but to a trained ear, and increasingly to an untrained one, there's a quality to it. A smoothness that's slightly too smooth. A cadence that never quite settles. It's the audio equivalent of a stock photo, technically fine, subtly impersonal.
To be honest, I've used it. I needed a vintage-sounding soundbite, something that felt like it came out of a 1960s broadcast, with a very specific word. I generated the voice, added some low-fi audio effects, and it was done. The client loved it. That's the right use case.
When your video sounds like it could have been made by anyone, it probably won't be remembered by anyone.
What I'm not saying is that AI voice has no place. It absolutely does. The question is whether the place you're using it is the right one. If your video is the first thing a prospective client watches before deciding whether to book a call with you, that's not the moment to optimize for efficiency.
Your voice (or the voice you choose) is part of your brand signal. It tells people whether there's a real human being behind what you do.
Twenty-five years in, that still matters. Maybe more than ever.
That’s a wrap for now!