You would never film a video without a shot list or ship a landing page without a wireframe. Yet most people generating AI narration skip straight to the "generate" button and hope the voice matches the mood.
The gap shows. Sections drift in tone, pacing lurches from rushed to sluggish, and the whole piece sounds stitched together rather than authored. The fix isn't a better voice model. It's a few minutes of planning before you generate anything.
This article gives you a reusable AI voice creative brief: what to define, why each field matters, and how to translate those decisions into production. By the end, you'll have a template you can copy for every project.
Why the brief is the step everyone skips
Skipping pre-production feels efficient. You have a script, the tool has voices, so why not just press play? Because a script tells the model what to say, not how it should sound — and "how" is where coherence lives.
Professionals in adjacent fields treat this planning step as non-negotiable. Film and advertising teams work from a documented creative brief precisely because a shared reference prevents the drift that happens when every decision is made in the moment. The American Marketing Association describes the creative brief as the document that aligns everyone on objective, audience, and tone before production begins (American Marketing Association).
Audio has the same failure mode as any unplanned creative work: without a reference, each choice is made in isolation. One paragraph gets an energetic read, the next a flat one, and the listener feels the seams even if they can't name why.
There's a comprehension cost too, not just an aesthetic one. Research on cognitive load in multimedia learning shows that inconsistent or poorly paced audio increases the mental effort required to follow along, which reduces retention (segmentation and cognitive load in multimedia learning, PMC). A brief is how you protect the listener's attention before you spend it.
Section 1: Define the voice persona
Start with who is speaking. Not which voice ID — who. Write two or three sentences describing the narrator as if they were a character: their age range, their relationship to the listener, their expertise, their energy.
"A calm, mid-30s guide who has done this a hundred times and wants you to feel capable" produces very different casting decisions than "a fast, excited peer sharing something they just discovered." The persona is the filter you run every later choice through.
Turn the persona into casting criteria
Once the persona is written, casting becomes a search instead of a guess. You know you need warmth over authority, or clarity over character, and you can audition against that standard. With 650+ neural voices and preview, favorites, and Voice DNA recommendations in EchoLive, the catalog is only useful when you know what you're listening for.
For multi-host formats, write a persona per speaker and note how they contrast — one grounded, one curious — so the dynamic is intentional rather than accidental.
Section 2: Build the tone map
A single project rarely holds one emotion end to end. The tone map is where you assign a feeling to each part of the script before you generate it, so the emotional arc is designed rather than discovered.
Break your script into its natural sections — intro, body beats, transitions, close — and label each with a target tone. Intro: warm and inviting. Core explanation: measured and confident. Cautionary aside: slower, lower. Closing CTA: bright and encouraging.
Map tone to concrete controls
A tone map is only actionable if it connects to real production settings. This is where segment-level control matters: EchoLive's studio editor is segment-based, so per-segment voices, styles, pacing, and SSML let you realize each labeled tone independently instead of averaging the whole piece into one flat read.
For the finer emotional beats — a deliberate pause before a key point, gentle emphasis on a pivotal word, a softened phrase — plan them as SSML notes now and implement them later. EchoLive's visual SSML tools let you build breaks, emphasis, and prosody without hand-writing markup, but knowing where those beats go is a brief decision, not an editing one.
Section 3: Set pacing and duration goals
Pacing is the most common thing creators get wrong, because the default read is almost always too fast for comprehension. Decide your target words-per-minute range up front and note where you want deliberate slowdowns.
A general guideline: conversational narration lands comfortably around 140–160 words per minute, with explanatory or instructional content trending slower so listeners can process. Set a target, then flag the moments — definitions, numbers, transitions — that should breathe.
Also define your total duration target. A 12-minute explainer and a 4-minute summary of the same material demand different pacing and different cuts. Writing the target down forces you to decide what belongs before you generate audio you'll later throw away.
Note the listening context
How and where people will listen changes your pacing. Commute listening tolerates a slightly brisker pace; focused study content needs more room. If your audience will consume the piece as part of a longer queue — the way readers batch content in a read-it-later app or daily audio brief — clarity and consistent pacing matter even more, because your piece is competing with everything else in their backlog.
Section 4: Turn the brief into a production checklist
The brief isn't a document you file away — it's the spec you produce against. Before you generate, convert each section into a checklist you can verify.
- Persona: Chosen voice matches the written persona, auditioned against alternatives.
- Tone map: Every script segment has an assigned tone and matching per-segment settings.
- Pacing: Target WPM set; slowdown moments flagged and implemented via SSML.
- Duration: Final runtime within target; anything off-brief cut.
- Consistency: Same persona and defaults applied across all segments.
When you import your script, this checklist keeps structure intact. EchoLive's Smart Import handles txt, md, docx, pdf, and URLs with AI-assisted segmentation — turning a document to audio starts from clean sections that map directly onto your tone map instead of one undifferentiated block.
Batch operations then let you apply shared defaults across the whole project and adjust individual segments where the brief calls for it — the practical bridge between "planned" and "produced." If you want to pressure-test a persona and pacing choice quickly, try the playground before committing to a full generation.
A reusable template you can copy
Keep it short. A brief that takes an hour won't get used; one that takes five minutes will. Copy this structure into a note for every project:
- Project & objective: One line on what this audio is for.
- Audience & listening context: Who listens, and where.
- Voice persona: 2–3 sentences describing the narrator as a character.
- Tone map: Each script section with its target tone.
- Pacing goals: Target WPM range plus flagged slowdown moments.
- Duration target: Approximate final runtime.
- SSML notes: Specific pauses, emphasis, and pronunciations to build.
Fill those seven fields and you've already made the decisions that separate coherent audio from improvised audio. Everything after is execution.
The step most creators skip is the one that determines whether the finished piece sounds authored or assembled. Define the persona, map the tone, set the pacing — then generate. When you're ready to produce against your brief, EchoLive's studio editor and voice catalog are built for exactly this kind of intentional, section-by-section work.
Originally published on EchoLive.
