Most AI voice tools give you a menu of strangers. Pick the warm one, the deep one, the excited one, and narrate your video in a voice your audience has heard on a thousand other videos this week.
Speech Lab starts from the other end. The voice is yours: a short recording of you, speaking normally, becomes a narration voice that reads anything you write. Then you direct it the way you would direct a person, one line at a time. If you want it closer still, you can train it on a longer read. And if you want other people to use it, you can publish it with its own page to share.
This is what it does, how each part works, and what it will not do.
01 / FIELD NOTESTwenty seconds in, a voice out
Creating a voice takes one recording. Speech Lab accepts 10 seconds to 2 minutes of one person speaking, as WAV, MP3, M4A or WebM, recorded in the browser or the phone app or uploaded from a file. Twenty to thirty seconds of natural speech, with no music behind it, is the sweet spot.
Before anything is saved the recording is checked: it has to decode, contain at least six seconds of clear speech, stay quiet enough in the background and avoid clipping. A recording that fails those checks is refused with the reason, not quietly turned into a voice that sounds wrong. When it passes you hear a real preview, synthesised in the new voice, before you use it for anything.
Every voice starts with consent. You confirm that the voice is yours, or that its owner has given you permission, and that consent is recorded against your account with the time. Agents and API keys cannot give it on anybody's behalf: they have to send the person to Speech Lab to record.
02 / FIELD NOTESDirect it line by line
A script in Speech Lab is a list of lines, and each line carries its own delivery. Leave a line on Auto, or set it from Subtle through Balanced and Animated to Max. A product walkthrough can stay level through the steps and lift on the one line that matters; a story can hold back and then land the ending.
Pace is separate and applies to the whole take, from 0.75x to 1.25x. Enter splits a line, paste splits a block into lines, and Backspace at the start of a line merges it back, so rewriting feels like editing text rather than filling in a form.
If you do not have a script yet, ask the Director. Describe what you need ("a 30-second intro for a cooking channel, warm, ends on a question") and it drafts the lines with a delivery for each. A draft is only a draft: nothing is generated, and no narration credits are spent, until you read it and press Generate.
03 / FIELD NOTESTrain it until it sounds like you
A voice made from twenty seconds is a good likeness, but it is a likeness. Train my voice closes the gap. You read a guided script for a few minutes, between two and a half and twenty-one, with at least two minutes of actual speech, and Speech Lab fits a small adapter to your voice on our own GPU.
The training is checked against your own speech. Part of the recording is held back, and the adapter is kept only if it reproduces those unseen lines better than the untrained voice does. On our first internal run the error on held-back speech fell from 4.90 to 4.20, and the person whose voice it was said it sounded more like them. An adapter that does not beat the base voice is not kept.
Once trained, the voice speaks through its adapter everywhere it is used, including by other people if you publish it. The training recording is deleted as soon as training finishes, whether it succeeded or not. Train my voice costs 300 credits and is rolling out now, starting with early access.
04 / FIELD NOTESPublish it, with a page to share
A voice is private until you decide otherwise. To publish one you listen to and approve its preview, agree to the publishing terms, and give it a title, a creator name, a short description and up to five style tags. Published voices are listed at vidmoat.com/voices, and each one gets its own page.
That page is made for sharing. It plays the preview, shows who made the voice and what it is good for, and explains exactly how to use it: in Speech Lab with one click, from code with a copy-paste request, or from an AI agent. The page has share buttons for X, WhatsApp, Telegram and LinkedIn, and a link card that unfurls with the voice's name when you paste it into a chat.
You can withdraw a published voice at any time. New narration with it stops straight away; audio people already made stays theirs. Anyone who has a concern about a published voice can report it from its page.
05 / FIELD NOTESUse any voice from anywhere
A voice is used the same way whether it is yours or one somebody published. In Speech Lab you pick it, write, and generate. From code, POST /v1/speech/generations with its voiceId and either text, up to 8,000 characters, or up to 200 lines each with an expression from 0 to 1. From an agent connected over MCP, the agent_workspace tool's speech_generate action takes the same voice and the same lines.
Finished takes land in your Takes list, where you can play, download, or drop them straight into a video project. The editing agent can do that last step for you: ask it to narrate your edit with a named voice and it writes the narration onto the timeline.
curl --fail-with-body "https://api.vidmoat.com/v1/speech/generations" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $VIDMOAT_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "Idempotency-Key: $(uuidgen)" \
--data '{
"voiceId": "YOUR_VOICE_ID",
"lines": [
{ "text": "Every story starts with a voice.", "expression": 0.25 },
{ "text": "This one is yours.", "expression": 0.75 }
],
"speed": 1
}'06 / FIELD NOTESWhat it will not do
Speech Lab speaks English only for now. It reads what you write; it does not translate, and it does not sing.
Expression is delivery intensity, not a menu of emotions. Max makes a line more animated; it does not make it angry or sad on request, and a script that needs those is better recorded by a person.
A published voice's creator name is what its owner typed. Consent is recorded, but Vidmoat does not verify anyone's legal identity, and the page says so. There are no royalties for published voices today.
Audio from the expressive engine carries an inaudible watermark, so narration made here can be identified as synthetic later. That is deliberate, and it is not something you can turn off.
Common questions
How long a recording do I need to clone my voice?
Between 10 seconds and 2 minutes, with at least 6 seconds of clear speech. Twenty to thirty seconds of you talking naturally, with no music in the background, works best. Training a closer likeness takes a longer guided read, between two and a half and twenty-one minutes.
Can other people use my voice?
Only if you publish it. Voices are private by default. A published voice has its own page that anyone can listen to, and signed-in users can narrate with it using their own credits. You can withdraw it at any time, and new use stops immediately.
How much does it cost?
Narration uses your plan's AI credits, charged per started 1,000 characters, and the exact cost is shown before you generate. Voice generation is included from the Creator plan. Training a voice costs 300 credits, and failed takes are refunded automatically.
Can I control the emotion of each line?
Each line has its own delivery, from Subtle to Max, or Auto. That controls how animated the line is rather than which emotion it carries. Pace, from 0.75x to 1.25x, applies to the whole take.
Can an AI agent narrate with my voice?
Yes. Agents connected to Vidmoat over MCP use the agent_workspace tool, and the Vidmoat editing agent can narrate a project with any voice you own or any published voice. An agent cannot create a voice or give consent for you; recording always happens in Speech Lab.
Which languages are supported?
English, for now.