AI voice-overs: the licensing checklist before you publish
AI voices are good enough for real products now. Before you publish one, check these five things - most problems come from plans and terms, not quality.
AI text-to-speech has become good enough that most viewers can’t tell, or don’t care, that a narrator isn’t human. That makes it a natural fit for product videos: you can change a sentence and re-render in minutes instead of booking a studio again.
But “good enough to publish” and “allowed to publish” are different questions. Here’s the checklist we go through before any AI voice goes into a client video.
1. Does your plan allow commercial use?
Many TTS providers have a free tier - and free tiers often exclude commercial use or require you to credit the provider. A product demo on your website, an ad or a monetised YouTube channel is commercial use.
Check: the provider’s terms for the exact plan you’re on, at the time you generate the audio. If you upgrade later, regenerate anything you plan to keep using commercially.
2. Who owns the voice?
Providers usually offer two kinds of voices:
- Built-in voices made by the provider, covered by your plan’s terms.
- Community or library voices shared by other people, sometimes with their own restrictions - or not available through the API at all on some plans.
Check: whether the specific voice you chose can be used commercially on your plan, and whether its owner added extra conditions.
3. Never clone a voice without consent
Voice cloning makes it easy to sound like a real person. Use it only with that person’s explicit, written permission, for the uses they agreed to. Imitating a celebrity, a competitor’s spokesperson or a colleague who didn’t agree is a legal and ethical problem, whatever the tool allows.
4. Is the language really supported?
Not every model speaks every language well. Some multilingual models will read Vietnamese with a foreign accent; others are trained for it. A native speaker should always listen to the final audio - pronunciation of product names, numbers and abbreviations is where AI voices most often slip.
Tip: write numbers and acronyms the way they should be spoken in the script you send to the voice (“book dot example dot com”, “one-on-one”), and keep the written version for the captions.
5. Keep records
For every published video, keep:
- which provider and voice you used,
- which plan you were on and the date the audio was generated,
- the exact script.
If a question ever comes up - from a platform, a client or the provider - you can answer it in minutes.
What about music?
The same logic applies to background music. “Royalty-free” doesn’t always mean free for every use, and content-ID systems can flag tracks even when you have a licence. We avoid the question entirely by composing the music and sound effects for our videos ourselves.
The short version
| Question | You want the answer to be |
|---|---|
| Commercial use allowed on my plan? | Yes, in writing |
| Voice usable commercially? | Yes, built-in or explicitly licensed |
| Any cloned voices? | Only with written consent |
| Checked by a native speaker? | Yes |
| Records kept? | Provider, voice, plan, date, script |
None of this is complicated. It just has to be done every time.