Voiceover and narration

Turn a written script into natural spoken audio with directed delivery: the right emotion, pacing, emphasis, and voice for a video, an ad, an audiobook, or an IVR prompt. The lever is inline [bracket] direction tags that steer how each line is read, not just the words themselves.

Inputs to collect

• The script. The exact text to speak. (Ask only if none provided.)
• The voice. A preset/voice ID, or "pick a fitting one." For a custom or cloned voice see voice-cloning.
• The delivery brief: mood, energy, pace, and audience (calm audiobook, upbeat ad, neutral IVR, urgent alert). This drives the bracket tags.
• The use: video VO, ad, audiobook chapter, IVR/phone prompt. It sets the tone and whether filler words and non-verbals belong.
• Optional: language, and whether the source text is raw LLM output that needs normalizing (numbers, dates, abbreviations).

Models

• Default expressive narration: Fish Audio S2.1 Pro (fishaudio:s2.1@pro). Flagship multilingual TTS with rich bracket-tag control over emotion and paralanguage, 80+ languages, fast streaming. Best general voiceover pick.
• Conversational / realtime delivery: Inworld Realtime TTS-2 (inworld:tts@2). Free-form natural-language steering tags and built-in settings.textNormalization for clean speech from raw text. Strong for assistants, IVR, support agents.
• Preset premium timbres: Qwen3-TTS CustomVoice (alibaba:qwen@3-tts-1.7b-customvoice). Nine preset voices with a style hint via positivePrompt. Runware Optimized.
• Streaming dialogue-style TTS: Dia2 2B (runware:dia2@2b). Real-time streaming with non-verbal cues and speaker tags. Runware Optimized.
• Confirm each is live and inspect its exact fields via runware-models + runware-run before calling. Never hardcode a stale choice.

Workflow

1. Resolve the model schema (runware-run) and confirm the field names. The shape is audioInference with speech.text plus speech.voice (some models accept speech.language).
2. Write the script into speech.text with inline [bracket] direction tags placed before the text each one applies to.
3. If the text is raw LLM output (digits, dates, $1,249.99, abbreviations), enable normalization so it is spoken cleanly: settings.textNormalization: true on Inworld TTS-2.
4. Run audioInference asynchronously and poll getResponse until terminal. Audio is a time-based task, do not block a sync call on it.
5. Read the result from audioURL. Listen back, check the delivery against the brief, and retry lines that miss.

Technique

• Direction tags steer delivery, apply forward. A [bracket] tag placed before text tells the model how to read what follows. It carries forward until the next tag or the end of the input. You do not close or reset it. Drop a new tag where the mood shifts: [speak cheerfully] Great news, the build passed! [lower voice, more serious] But we need to talk about the memory leak.
• Write stage directions, not keywords. "Say this like you're confiding in a close friend late at night" beats "intimate". The model responds to prose. Layer multiple dimensions in one tag, mood plus pacing plus volume plus manner: [say sadly with deliberate pauses in a low voice and hushed style] is a real read, "sad" is not.
• Core tags vs free-form. Fish S2.1 Pro ships reliable built-in tags ([excited], [sad], [whisper], [laughs], [angry], [surprised]) and also accepts any descriptive phrase ([whispers sweetly], [laughing nervously]). Start with the core set for consistency, reach for free-form when you need nuance the core set misses.
• Paralanguage for timing and texture. Insert specific audio events where they land. Fish S2.1 Pro uses parenthesis cues (break), (long-break), (breath), (sigh), (laugh), (cough) and requires settings.normalize: false for them. Inworld TTS-2 uses inline non-verbals [laugh], [sigh], [breathe], [clear throat], [cough], [yawn]. Place them where a human would actually do them.
• Text-level controls work without tags. Capitalize a word to stress it (I told you NOT to do that), partial caps stress a syllable (AbsoLUTEly). Punctuation paces the read: periods are full stops, commas are short breaks, ellipses trail for hesitation. Use emphasis on one or two words per sentence at most.
• Normalize when piping LLM output. LLMs emit digits, dates, currencies, and markdown. settings.textNormalization: true (Inworld) expands $1,249.99 to "one thousand two hundred forty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents" and 3:45 PM to "three forty-five PM" before synthesis. Or instruct the LLM to write spoken-form text and ban markdown in its system prompt (see the TTS-2 LLM system-prompts guide). Normalization can be ambiguous on dates, so normalize those yourself when the application handles them.
• Match fillers to the use. "Uh", "um", "well" make a companion sound human and make an IVR or support line sound broken. Include them for casual narration, exclude them for professional VO.
• Don't fight the content. A tag must match the line. [sound happy] on a somber line pulls the model in two directions and degrades the read. Keep each tag internally consistent. Pairing [whisper] with [very loud] conflicts.
• Pronunciation overrides for genuine mispronunciations. Fish S2.1 Pro supports CMU Arpabet phoneme control between <|phoneme_start|> and <|phoneme_end|> for homographs, brand names, and jargon, also gated on settings.normalize: false. Reserve it for words the model actually gets wrong.
• For multiple speakers, this is the wrong skill. See dialogue-audio. For a voice that is not a preset (a clone of a specific person or brand voice), see voice-cloning.

Inline tag patterns

• Emotion and steering tags apply forward. A [bracket] tag placed before text steers everything that follows until the next tag or the end of input. Drop a new tag only where the mood shifts, not on every sentence.
• Paralanguage drops in place. Fish uses (cue) parentheses ((break), (breath), (sigh)) and needs settings.normalize: false. Inworld uses inline [non-verbal] brackets ([laugh], [sigh], [breathe]). Place each where a human would do it.
• Text-normalization gate. Inworld settings.textNormalization: true expands raw numbers, dates, and prices. Fish settings.normalize (default true) must be false for (cues) and <|phoneme|> overrides, so it strips them when on.
• Load references/examples.md for full worked requests (emotional ad read, normalized explainer, branded IVR).

Parameters that matter

• speech.text: the script, including inline [bracket] direction tags and any paralanguage cues. Required.
• speech.voice: the voice ID or preset name. Different voices respond to the same direction with different intensity, so pick the voice first, then tune the tags to it.
• speech.language: set it where the model exposes it (Qwen, some Inworld locales) for correct phonetics.
• settings.textNormalization (Inworld TTS-2): true to expand numbers/dates/abbreviations from raw text into spoken form.
• settings.normalize (Fish S2.1 Pro): must be false for paralanguage (cues) and <|phoneme|> overrides, otherwise those tokens get stripped.
• positivePrompt (Qwen CustomVoice): an optional style/emotion hint, e.g. "Speak with great enthusiasm".
• Confirm exact field names against the live schema (runware-run). Bracket-tag and paralanguage syntax differs per model, so never carry one model's cues onto another without checking.

Quality bar

• The read matches the brief: right emotion, pace, and energy for the use (calm audiobook, upbeat ad, neutral IVR).
• Direction tags carry forward correctly and shift only where the script's mood shifts, not on every sentence (over-tagging produces a jittery, unnatural read).
• Numbers, dates, prices, and abbreviations are spoken cleanly, not read as raw symbols (normalization on, or pre-expanded).
• No tag contradicts its line. Paralanguage and phoneme cues only used with normalization off on Fish. Emphasis is selective.
• Audio was generated async and read from audioURL. Retry any line that mispronounces, rushes, or misses the emotion.

Related skills

runware-run, runware-models, runware-prompting; dialogue-audio (multiple speakers in one generation), voice-cloning (custom or cloned voice), talking-avatar (drive a face with the voiceover), ugc-ad (voiceover inside a full ad).