Choosing the right AI voice is key to maximizing audio engagement.

You need a lifelike voice that listeners enjoy listening to and find easy to understand. It should also reflect the nature of your content and brand.

We've brought together tips for choosing an AI voice that truly resonates with your target audience, so you can create automated audio that keeps listeners listening.

1. Choose the right language and locale

The most important thing is that the AI voice speaks your language. But if your language is spoken in multiple regions, you might also need to consider locale.

Our voice library covers 70-plus languages across more than 140 locales. For example, you can have your English-language content read in an Australian, British, Canadian, Hong Kong, Indian, Irish, Kenyan, New Zealand, Nigerian, Filipino, Singaporean, South African, Tanzanian, US, or Welsh accent.

We also use different natural language processing algorithms for each locale. This allows us to ensure that voices pronounce words and other elements like a native would. For example, en-US voices read '10/01' as "October first", whereas en-GB voices say "the tenth of January".

2. Think about representation

Biases concerning accent, age, and gender can affect people's perceptions of voices. Listeners make judgements about traits like intelligence and trustworthiness based on accent alone.¹

These often reflect stereotypes that exist in the general public. For example, one study found that female voice overs are considered more soothing, whereas male voice overs are considered more forceful.²

Rather than appealing to these biases, you can make your audio more authentic, engaging, and inclusive by focusing on representation. Millennials and Gen Zs in the UK agree that, as a culture, we're more open to hearing from diverse voices than ever before.³

Represent the author: If you are converting authored content into audio, using the author's voice adds a personal touch. With our voice cloning service, you can create an AI voice that sounds just like you or a writer on your team. The next-best option is to choose an AI voice that best matches the accent, age, and gender of the author.

Represent the audience: People can better identify with voices that sound like their own, and tend to find them more trustworthy.⁴ This is particularly important when you're covering in-group topics - for example, women's lifestyle or regional news.

Our AI voice library includes adult male and female voices from 140+ locales. We also offer a number of children's AI voices, which are ideal for making child-friendly audio.

3. Create demos

Listening to voice demos can help you make a subjective call on how natural the AI voice sounds and whether it will suit your content.

When you're choosing AI voices in BeyondWords, you can press the play button alongside to hear a short preview. The voice will typically say "Hello, you are listening to a preview of this voice" (or a translation). You can also listen to these previews via our voice demo tool.

After shortlisting your favorite voices, you might want to create extended demos in our Text-to-Speech Editor. You can enter any text and set a different voice for each paragraph, then review the audio output. This makes it easy to experiment and compare different options.

4. Listen to audio in your niche

If you don't know what kind of voice will suit your content, it's helpful to listen to other audio in your niche. Whether it's delivered by a human or AI, this will give you a good idea of what voice types work.

News broadcasting, for example, is associated with a distinct speaking style. This helps reporters to be clear, neutral, and trustworthy. As a result, similar voices are being used for AI-narrated news articles. Amazon Polly has even developed specific 'Newscaster' voices⁵ (Matthew (US English), Joanna (US English), Lupe (US Spanish), and Amy (British English)), which are available through our library.

5. Get audience feedback

Through tes...