What is voiceover and how to use it?
Highlights
The use of voice over in film and video is far-reaching, both in its creative application and practical use. This may come as bad news to those of you who find the experience of listening to your own recorded voice unpleasant or even surreal, as many do. In fact, the phenomenon is so common it has earned its own name - voice confrontation!
But the good news is that your videos could benefit greatly if you can overcome your voice confrontation and figure out how to write, record, and edit good voiceovers. In this article, we'll be looking at 3 main things:
- What is voiceover?
- When to use it (as well as when not to)
- Most importantly, how to produce high-quality voiceover without breaking the bank.
- The latest voiceover tools on Artlist
- How to use those tools in your workflow
What voiceover is and when to use it
While the concept of voiceover is likely familiar to most of us, defining it and looking at examples could be a good way to get inspiration for your own voiceover projects. Voiceover refers to the use of recorded speech placed over associated visuals but without including visuals of the speaker. So then, it is typically a separate audio asset that you incorporate into your video that is recorded with an emphasis on audio quality. This is as opposed to occasions where you might extract dialogue from a video clip to use over other footage, such as when performing split edits (J-cuts or L-cuts).
Today, voiceover is commonly used across YouTube videos, TikTok explainers, podcasts, tutorials, online courses, branded content, documentaries, and social media storytelling. Most viewers are now highly familiar with voiceover as part of modern creator content.
So, in what instances might you expect to find voiceover? Perhaps its most iconic use is in trailer narration, though admittedly becoming dated. Most famously of all must be the "in a world…" genre of trailers of the 1980s-2000s, voiced by the now legendary Don LaFontaine.
This specific approach to editing trailers is now considered a little corny and is only used ironically these days. However, it still demonstrates the crucial voiceover principle, which can be applied in contemporary work to great effect. This principle communicates a lot of information without boring the audience and adds more drama and interest to what is seen. If not in trailer narration, you will certainly find voiceover used for this purpose elsewhere.
Still within the narrative context, for example, voiceover is often used in film or TV where you need to convey large amounts of information in a limited time, often to establish details that the rest of the story relies on. In the example below from X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), we hear voiceover, which makes sense of the visuals we are seeing, but that also adds more than the visuals could imply on their own. It is also used to build excitement and curiosity in the viewer and establishes some of the key themes explored in the film.
Voiceovers are used more and more on social media and tutorial-based content — a great way to increase the accessibility of our videos. Here’s some examples of recent successful voiceover campaigns across mediums:
Creators today take advantage of the latest voiceover features to add personality, pacing, and storytelling to short-form content, reviews, explainers, and educational videos across platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
In Specsavers’ “The Relationship Aid” campaign, they use seductive, almost parody-style narration before revealing it’s actually a hearing-aid campaign. It’s very contemporary in tone: self-aware, social-first, and built for cross-platform cutdowns.The Jet2 TikTok trend is one of the clearest examples of voiceover entering internet culture itself. The “Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday” voiceover became a meme audio format across TikTok and Instagram.
In film, voiceover is used when the information you need to convey cannot be communicated visually. The opening 5 minutes of Dune (2021) is a good example.
Voiceover is an engaging method of communicating information to the viewer in Goodfellas (1990) (“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster”).
Voiceover adds something unique and creative when introducing “The Dude” in The Big Lebowski (1998):
When considering voiceover in the video context, the principal benefits are the same. Whether it’s an advertisement, vlog, tutorial, review, or artistic piece, the use of voiceover can be crucial.
While you may wish to talk directly to the camera for many types of videos, voiceover will be the better choice in a lot of cases. Consider the advertisement below by Sam Kolder, promoting his masterclass. While he does talk directly to the camera in many of his other videos, in this case, the use of voiceover adds a degree of professionalism and production value that complements the video's purpose.
One of the most powerful features of voiceover is its capacity to breathe life and energy into the visuals they accompany. They do so with the human connection of having a real person talk to you, the audience, throughout.
Of all the video creators out there, not many rival Casey Neistat in the ability to creatively combine visuals and sound to craft highly entertaining stories, all with a personal touch and unique style. In the example below, voiceover is used extremely creatively to give the visuals greater meaning. It allows each clip to contribute towards a singular idea despite being so different.
So, having now looked at examples of voiceover in action, let's summarize the benefits of good voiceover:
- Conveying information
- Adding drama/interest/creativity
- connecting and adding meaning to different components of a video
Now it's time to talk about how you can go about actually creating voiceover to enhance your own videos.
How to create a voiceover
Let's work out the process of creating a voiceover to ensure that your end result does justice to your creativity and that (ideally) you don't break the bank. You can record voiceovers in the traditional way, or one cost-effective and increasingly popular method is using AI.
AI voice generators
Synthesized voices are nothing new, but technology is constantly evolving, meaning that computer-generated voices now sound uncannily human rather than robotic and that AI is opening up enormous possibilities when it comes to speech.
Just as ChatGPT produces text based on learning from huge inputs of data, AI voice generators are also trained on vast quantities of spoken words. This enables them to learn what human voices actually sound like, how we all vary in tone, pitch, and pace, that we have differing accents, and that our emotions can have an impact on our delivery, too. The greater the library of human voices an AI voice generator trains on, the more realistic it will sound.
When trained, an AI voice generator produces audio files using AI text-to-speech technology. It breaks down the text into its phonetic components and synthesizes them into words and sentences.
An AI voice generator that includes natural language processing technology will be able to produce more natural-sounding audio. These generators have been programmed to reflect nuances in speech and language, for example, how we tend to raise our pitch toward the end of a sentence when asking a question.
The pace of improvement around AI technology means that voiceovers are sounding exceptionally realistic and diverse.
Today, AI voice generators are used by creators, marketers, educators, and businesses to create YouTube narration, social media content, tutorials, podcasts, ads, product demos, audiobooks, and multilingual content quickly and affordably.
How to create a voiceover with Artlist AI Toolkit
Follow the below steps to make voiceovers for your videos, easily.
Steps to generating the perfect voiceover:
Step 1
Open the Artlist AI Toolkit and select AI Voiceover.
Step 2
Write your script into the prompt box.
Step 3
Choose a voice and settings, including language, tone, accent, and style.
Step 4
Preview the generated voiceover and make adjustments if needed.
Step 5
Generate the voiceover and preview the result.
Step 6
Edit your script, pacing, or voice selection until you are happy with the result.
Step 7
Export the final audio file and add it directly into your video edit.
Traditional voiceover recording
Choosing a microphone
This is a big decision and probably the part of this process that could risk costing you the most money. Fortunately, many budget options exist that still record sound to a good standard. At the end of this article, you'll find a table outlining some of the most popular options at different price points. In the meantime, we'd recommend reading DJ Pangburn's comprehensive article on the best microphone choices depending on the kind of audio you need to capture.
Before moving on, however, here are a few of the most important things to factor into your decision:
- Consider the polar pattern of your microphone. This basically refers to the space around your microphone that it will pick up sound from. For voiceover, you will likely want a unidirectional - or "cardioid" - microphone rather than an omnidirectional one. This ensures you capture only the sound in front of the mic (your voice) rather than everything in the whole room.
The unidirectional microphone polar pattern (left) is better than the omnidirectional polar pattern (right) for voiceover
- Most mics are either dynamic or condenser—what makes one type more suitable than the other could be quite specific to you. Condenser mics are typically considered best for voiceover as they pick up more detail in the voice. Still, at the same time, they can pick up more unwanted sounds from your environment as well. Dynamic mics will be more forgiving here. However, if you have ideal audio recording conditions, your result may not be as rich as a condenser mic in the same situation.
- Studio microphones are most commonly used for voiceover work, though shotgun microphones can also be suitable.
- Think about all the kinds of audio you'll want to record for your videos, not just voiceover. If you're on a tight budget, you may find a mic suitable for various contexts to be better than an excellent voiceover mic that's not great for anything else (like capturing audio on a film set).
Preparing the room
The treatment of the room you aim to record a voiceover it will probably make more of a difference to the quality of your audio than nearly any other factor. Perhaps you're lucky enough to have access to a studio or a soundproof room fitted with acoustic panels. In all likelihood, you won't, but that's ok. You can do plenty to a room at no additional expense to dramatically improve audio quality. This can broadly be thought of as a twofold process.
- Soundproofing: This is doing what you can to prevent outside, unwanted noises from entering your recording. If you are recording in your own house, you'll hopefully get away with just choosing the quietest room possible, shutting doors and windows, and hanging material over them (blankets, rugs, etc.). However, if thin walls, noisy neighbors, nearby traffic, etc., are serious issues, you may need to consider other recording locations.
- Sound treatment: Unlike soundproofing, sound treatment favorably manipulates sound quality within a room (including sound from the intended source). When you begin speaking, a portion of that sound will travel directly into your microphone (direct noise). Still, most of it spreads around your room, bounces off walls and other objects, and then enters the microphone (reflected noise). With voiceover especially, you generally want to minimize reflected noise and maximize direct noise for a clean sound. To do this, you could take away hard objects in the room and cover any remaining ones with absorbent material.
When trying to treat their room for sound, some people will completely circle themselves with rugs and blankets or record in a literal closet. While they have the right idea, if there is no reflected noise whatsoever, the recording can sound too flat, unnaturally so. Technically, the best way to avoid this is to invest in sound diffusers, which reflect sounds evenly rather than reflecting just particular frequencies. Short of this. However, you can just play around with the sound-reflective objects you do have in your home and see which contributes to the best overall sound.
AI voiceover setup
With AI voiceover tools, the focus is no longer on treating a physical recording space, but on getting the most out of the platform’s creative controls. Tools like Artlist AI Voiceover now support 70+ languages, allowing creators to generate narration for global audiences instantly.
You can also choose from a wide range of English accents, including American, British, Australian, and Indian, with full voice previews to help match tone and audience.
Key controls allow you to fine-tune performance:
- Stability control adjusts how expressive or consistent the voice sounds (lower = more expressive variation, higher = more stable delivery)
- Voice speed can be set between 0.5x and 1.5x for slower or faster delivery
- Voice effects like Walkie-Talkie, Robotic Assistant, and Vintage Radio let you instantly stylise audio without post-production
Beyond text-to-speech, speech-to-speech technology allows you to upload a recorded performance and transform it into another voice while preserving timing, pacing, emotion, and delivery — keeping the original performance intact while changing the voice identity.
Creators can also work more efficiently using:
- A voice catalog with filters (model, category, gender, age, language) to quickly find the right voice
- Custom voice uploads (up to 5 minutes), with support for generating in multiple languages
- File uploads in MP3, WAV, or OGG
For even faster workflows, AI voiceover can be used directly inside Adobe Premiere Pro via the Artlist extension, allowing you to browse voices and generate narration without leaving your timeline. This removes friction and keeps editing fully in flow.
Writing a script
Before having fun with the purely technical side of voiceover, it’s vital to think through your script before recording. Stream of consciousness and off-the-cuff voiceover may work for certain types of videos, but voiceover is at its best when it complements and enriches the visuals it accompanies. This is much harder to achieve without planning.
Before generating voiceover, scripting remains one of the most important creative steps — even with AI tools. Good scripts still rely on the same fundamentals: clarity, pacing, and intent. However, AI voiceover adds new flexibility, meaning scripts can now be:
- quickly iterated and rewritten
- tested in multiple voices or languages
- adapted for different platforms (social, ads, long-form)
A strong script should still:
- be concise and intentional
- avoid over-explaining what visuals already show
- prioritise rhythm and listenability, since voiceover is still an audio-first experience
As helpful as voiceover is at communicating information, you can only get away with it if it is interesting. Try to write concisely so as not to waste the listener’s time, but also take advantage of the human element voiceover provides to add some flair to your writing.
Since voiceover is made to go alongside visuals, it’s good to write with the viewer’s experience in mind. If the visuals communicate something already, then saying it in voiceover is like repeating yourself. For example, in Evan Puschak’s video essay on Logan (2017), he says, “I wonder if you can think of a superhero film that might fall into that category” while showing an iconic Batman clip — letting the audience make the connection themselves rather than over-explaining it. This creates a more cohesive and intentional viewing experience.
Now, writers can focus more on meaning and tone instead of recording constraints. A useful approach is to write scripts designed to be tested, adjusted, and re-voiced until the pacing and delivery feel right.
Delivery
Assuming you are the voice for your voiceover (though, of course, you don't have to be), you may want to practice how you'll deliver your carefully written script. From a technical standpoint and in terms of audience reception, you will want to find consistency in your pace and volume. That's not to say you can't speed up and slow down or speak louder and quieter for dramatic effect. Still, you want to establish a default pace and volume to return to so the viewer isn't taken out of the experience by noticing shifts in these things.
Clarity is another area to be conscious of. You want to strike a delicate balance between sounding clear and understandable without sounding like you are reading word-for-word from a script (even though you probably are).
Try to make sure you are in a comfortable position when recording, which should also help with volume consistency. Perhaps the most helpful tip is to practice. Record samples and, assuming you have overcome your voice confrontation, listen back to them and analyze whether you sound natural!
Post-production
In video, you can fine-tune so many variables (exposure, color, framing, etc.) that even a bad shot from the camera could become a good-looking shot after editing. With audio, while there are just as many, if not more, fine-tunable adjustments available, they generally rely very heavily on the original recording's standard. If you have bad background noise, the volume is too low, a lot of unwanted reflected noise, or inconsistent volume, you can do things to minimize the prominence of these issues in the post. However, you are unlikely to ever get a crisp, clean finished product.
Assuming you do have clean audio, what else can you do to improve it even further?
This isn't the kind of question that has a one-size-fits-all answer. The kind of editing that your audio needs depends on several factors:
- The microphone
- The environment in which the audio was recorded
- Even the recorded voice.
However, depending on each of these factors, you will likely want to use a few tools in your own voiceover to varying extents. I would prioritize compressor, EQ (equalizer), de-esser, and any mainstream audio editing software that allows you to adjust these elements. The video below from Potato Jet covers these 3 areas excellently with the help of professional sound mixer Alex Knickerbocker.
Voiceover vs AI voice generator for creators and businesses
If you are uncertain whether you should stick with a traditional voiceover or try an AI-generated voiceover, let’s look at the pros and cons of both.
Feature | Traditional voiceover | AI voice generator |
Speed | Slower recording and editing process | Fast generation and revisions |
Cost | Can require equipment and talent | More affordable and scalable (no need to hire voice actors or use studio equipment) |
Flexibility | Human nuance and emotion, with precise control over intonation, cadence, accent, and pronunciation | Multiple voices, languages, and styles from the same script |
Revisions | Requires re-recording sessions | Instant script edits and regeneration |
Precision | High precision in performance, tone, cadence, pronunciation, and emotional delivery | High control through prompts and settings, but less natural human nuance |
Ethics / Transparency | Clear human performance with established production practices | Questions around training data, deepfakes, and potential job displacement concerns |
Best for | Emotional storytelling, branded films, cinematic content | Tutorials, social content, explainers, and high-volume workflows |
The latest voiceover tools
These AI voice models and tools expand what’s possible with voiceover, giving creators more control, realism, and flexibility across both performance and localization.
MiniMax Speech 02 HD is best for clean, studio-grade narration with stable, predictable delivery, making it ideal for professional explainer and long-form voiceover work.
Cartesia Sonic 3 focuses on expressive, real-time speech with stronger emotional range and control, making it ideal for dynamic, performance-led content. Cartesia Sonic 2 delivers natural, conversational voiceovers with strong realism and pacing, making it great for creator-style narration and social content. Cartesia Voice Changer lets you transform recorded speech into different voices while preserving timing and emotion, making it powerful for localization and performance editing.
Eleven v3 is a highly expressive voice model with strong emotional direction and audio tag control, making it ideal for character-driven and cinematic storytelling. ElevenLabs audio tags allow you to guide voice performance using simple bracket commands like tone, emotion, and action, giving you granular creative control over delivery.
ElevenLabs Multilingual v2 enables high-quality voiceover generation across many languages, making it ideal for scaling content to global audiences quickly and naturally.
Wrapping up
So, we’ve taken a close look at voiceover, when to use it, and how to produce it. Hopefully, you’ll now have the tools and understanding to add it professionally to your next project.
Key shifts in voiceover:
- Voiceover is no longer just for film and TV — it’s now a massive part of short-form content across social platforms
- AI voice tools have made it faster, cheaper, and easier to produce high-quality audio to accompany your videos
- Most creators are now mixing human and AI voices depending on the project, budget, and turnaround time
In practice, creators are using human voiceover for emotionally driven storytelling, and turning to AI voices for fast-paced social content, explainers, and content testing. Many production teams now switch between both in the same project — using AI for early drafts, then bringing in human voices for tone, nuance, and identity.
With these tips and new technology like AI voice generation, you’ll be in a good place creatively and technically to ensure your voiceover maximizes your video’s potential.
Ready to level up your workflow? Explore AI Voiceover in the Artlist AI Toolkit to create professional narration faster and more efficiently.
