How to make an AI voiceover for a video (step by step)

You’ve got the footage and a script, but not a microphone you trust - or a voice you want on camera. An AI voiceover solves it: paste the script, pick a voice, download an MP3, and line it up with your cuts. Here’s the whole workflow, start to finish, in about five minutes.

What you’ll need

• Your script (or the lines you want narrated).
• A free Speecho account - voice generation is account-only so your clips and credits are saved to you.
• Your usual video editor (Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut, CapCut - anything that imports MP3).

Step 1 - Open the Voice tab and paste your script

In the app, switch to the Text to speech tab and paste your narration into the text box. It takes up to 250,000 characters, and a long script is voiced part by part, so you hear the first part before paying for the rest. For video, scene-sized chunks are still the handier unit; you’ll place them separately on the timeline anyway.

Step 2 - Pick a quality tier

You’ll see three tiers. Match it to the video:

• Standard - clear voices for everyday use, cheapest, 50+ languages and native speakers for 19 of them. Great for tutorials and drafts.
• Enhanced (ElevenLabs) - more lifelike and expressive. The right default for most published videos.
• Premium (ElevenLabs) - the most natural, for flagship uploads.

Text in German, Spanish, French, Japanese or another of thirty-one languages? The Enhanced and Premium tiers have native speakers for it, and Standard has them for these four too - see the German, Spanish, French and Japanese voice pages.

Not sure? Start with Enhanced. (There’s a fuller breakdown in ElevenLabs vs OpenAI: which voice do you need?.)

Step 3 - Choose a voice and preview it free

Pick a voice whose tone fits your channel, and hit preview. This is free - you can audition every voice in your language before spending a single credit, so try a couple and trust your ears.

Step 4 - Generate and download the MP3

Happy with the preview? Generate the clip. In a few seconds you’ll get a player where you can check the result, adjust playback speed, and download a standard MP3. That file is yours to re-download anytime.

With an Enhanced or Premium voice, the arrow next to the MP3 also gives you subtitles as an SRT or VTT file, timed word by word to the audio and free. Drop it on the timeline next to the MP3 and the captions line up with the narration, at whatever playback speed you downloaded, with nothing to transcribe. Standard voices don’t have subtitles.

Step 5 - Drop it on your timeline

Import the MP3 into your editor and lay it under your footage. Because you’re placing it yourself - not relying on automatic sync - you keep full control: nudge lines to hit your cuts, add a beat of silence before a reveal, duck it under music. That manual control is exactly what you want when editing to a script.

Getting clean, well-paced narration

A few habits make AI narration sound intentional rather than rushed:

• Punctuate for breath. Commas and full stops become pauses. Short sentences read better aloud than long ones - write for the ear. To hear where a sentence runs too long before you pay for a voice, play the script in a free browser voice first.
• Place a pause exactly where you want one. On Enhanced, Premium and most Standard voices, type [pause] for about a second of silence or [long pause] for about two - handy before a reveal or between list items. A word in CAPITALS gets extra stress. A few Standard voices read plain text, so the tags are dropped there; capitals still work.
• Direct the delivery with tags. A tag in square brackets shapes the words after it: [whispering] for a secret, [excited] for a reveal, [laughs] or [sighs] for a human beat, [slowly] for a line that needs weight. Enhanced and Premium also take accents and any short direction in English, such as [like a sports commentator]; the native Standard voices know a shorter list, and some of them follow it better than others. Tags don’t land every time, so voice a sentence or two before the whole script.
• Spell tricky words phonetically if a name or acronym comes out wrong (“Speecho” as “Speecho”, “SQL” as “sequel”).
• Break long paragraphs into separate clips per scene. It’s easier to place, and easier to re-do one line without re-rendering everything.
• Match energy to content. Enhanced or Premium for anything with personality; Standard is fine for straight, factual narration.

Two voices or more: a dialogue

If the video has two narrators, or characters who talk to each other, write the script with a name in front of each line (Anna: ..., Tom: ...) and switch the panel from Text to Dialogue; paste such a script into the text box and the app offers the switch itself. Every name becomes a character with its own voice, you pick the pause between lines, and you download one MP3 with every line in order. It costs exactly what the same text costs in one voice. More on multi-voice text to speech.

Fixing one part later

A long script voiced in parts, or a dialogue, doesn’t have to be voiced again because of one sentence. Press Voice this part again on that part (or Voice this line again on a dialogue line): pick another voice, correct a word, or add a direction like [whispers], and only that part is redone while the rest stays as it is. The same text costs that part’s price again; a changed text costs the price of the new text.

Bonus: the same voiceover in another language

Want a second-language version of the video? Paste a translated script and generate the voiceover with a matching voice - you’ll get a clean MP3 in that language to drop onto a duplicate of your timeline. If your video started as a recording, you can even transcribe it and translate the transcript inside Speecho first, then voice the translation.

One honest caveat: this gives you narration in another language, not automatic dubbing - there’s no lip-sync or automatic timing to the original speaker. For voiceover-style videos (explainers, faceless channels, product demos) that’s exactly what you need; for a talking-head you’ll re-time the lines by hand.

What it costs

Per-character pricing means a voiceover is cheap. A three-minute explainer is roughly 3,000 characters - about 30 cents on Standard or 70 cents on Enhanced. Top up from $5, and since credits never expire, buying a little extra is never wasted. See the full pricing breakdown.

Ready to give your next video a voice? Open the Voice tab, paste your script, and preview a voice free.