How to Use AI to Write a Speech (Without Losing Your Voice)
Liam Sandford
Liam Sandford is a public speaking coach, marketing leader, and 2x Best Selling Author, including the book Effortless Public Speaking. He helps introverted professionals and leaders take control of public speaking anxiety and use speaking to market themselves, build influence, and communicate with impact.
Writing a speech is rarely just about finding the right words. It is about shaping thinking, deciding what matters most, and creating a message that feels clear enough to deliver with confidence. This is where many speakers get stuck. They either overthink the content or rush the structure, which leads to speeches that feel scattered or overly scripted.
AI can support the speech writing process by reducing friction at the earliest stages. It helps you move from a blank page to clarity faster, without removing your voice or ownership of the message. When used intentionally, AI does not write your speech for you. It helps you think, organise, and refine so that the final speech sounds like you and feels natural to deliver. The goal is not to outsource speech writing, but to make the process calmer, clearer, and more deliberate.
Before You Use AI to Write Your Speech
Before AI becomes useful, you need a foundation to work from. Many speakers jump straight into asking AI to write content, which almost always leads to generic results. AI performs best when it is guided by intention, constraints, and context. This stage is about setting direction. The clearer you are before prompting AI, the more relevant and usable the outputs will be. Think of this as preparing the brief rather than asking for a finished product.
Start With Clarity Before You Ask AI to Write Anything
AI struggles when it is asked to solve unclear problems. If you are vague about your goal, audience, or outcome, the speech content will reflect that confusion. Before using AI, take time to clarify the fundamentals. Ask yourself who the audience is, why you have been asked to speak, and what you want the audience to walk away thinking, feeling, or doing differently. These answers do not need to be perfect, but they do need to exist. Even rough clarity dramatically improves AI outputs.
Starting here also prevents over reliance later. When you are clear on the direction, you can use AI to support your thinking rather than letting it dictate the content. This keeps the speech anchored to your intent and prevents drift.
Using AI to Clarify Your Core Message
Every strong speech is built around a single core message. Without it, speeches become collections of points rather than a coherent experience. AI can help you identify and sharpen this message early.
You can use AI to explore different ways of articulating your central idea, pressure test it against the audience, or reduce a broad topic into a single, focused message. Seeing multiple versions side by side makes it easier to recognise what actually matters. The value here is not the final wording AI produces. It is the clarity you gain by comparing options. This process forces prioritisation and helps you commit to a message that everything else in the speech will support.
How to Use AI to Structure Your Speech
Structure is what makes a speech feel effortless to follow. Even compelling ideas lose impact when they are poorly organised. AI can help you move quickly from scattered thoughts to a clear, logical flow.
This is not about locking yourself into a rigid script. It is about giving your speech a shape that makes sense to your audience and easy for you to remember. You should always use the Nano Speech as your framework for structuring public speaking. I created it to be useful in every public speaking scenario, including conversations.
Using AI to Create a Clear Speech Structure
AI is particularly effective at generating structural options. You can ask it to outline your speech using a clear framework, such as the Nano Speech, ensuring there is an engaging open, a strong body, and a purposeful close.
This allows you to see how ideas might be sequenced, where emphasis belongs, and how much content is realistic for the time available. It also helps you spot gaps, such as missing context or unclear transitions. The key is to treat these outlines as drafts, not instructions. Choose the structure that feels most natural to speak and adjust it so it fits your style. The structure should support your delivery, not constrain it. For more on using AI to create your Nano Speeches, check out the Ultimate Guide to AI for Public Speaking.
Refining Flow and Transitions With AI
Flow is often what separates confident speakers from forgettable ones. AI can help you identify where your speech might feel disjointed or abrupt and suggest smoother ways to connect ideas. I often say that transitions are where presentations and speeches are won and lost, because done poorly they are where people ramble, and done well, creates a smooth flow.
You can ask AI to review transitions between sections or suggest bridging phrases that maintain momentum. This reduces cognitive load for your audience and makes the speech easier to follow. Refining flow also improves your confidence as a speaker. When you know how one idea naturally leads to the next, you are less likely to lose your place or feel rushed. The speech starts to feel like a conversation rather than a performance.
How to Use AI to Write Each Part of Your Speech
Once the structure is in place, AI becomes more useful in refining the specifics of your speech. This is where your speech starts to take shape, but it is also where many speakers lose control. The temptation is to ask AI to write large chunks of content and then simply edit them down. This usually leads to speeches that feel technically sound but emotionally flat.
The most effective approach is to stay involved and intentional at every stage. AI should be used to explore possibilities, generate options, and surface clarity. It should not be used to finalise language or dictate what you say. Your role is to evaluate, refine, and decide what belongs in the speech and what does not.
Think of AI as a lens rather than a pen. It helps you see your ideas more clearly, but you still choose how they are expressed. When you stay actively involved, the speech remains yours, and delivery becomes far more natural.
Writing an Engaging Opening With AI
The opening sets the tone for everything that follows. Within the first moments, the audience decides whether to pay attention, disengage, or mentally check out. This is why openings are often the hardest part of the speech to write. AI can be particularly helpful here because it allows you to explore multiple directions quickly without overcommitting to any one of them.
You might ask AI to suggest openings that frame a problem the audience recognises, challenge an assumption they hold, highlight a tension they are experiencing, or directly reference the context they are in. Seeing these options side by side helps you understand what feels relevant rather than impressive. Relevance and clarity always beats cleverness in public speaking.
Once you identify an opening that resonates, the real work begins. Rewrite it in your own words and say it out loud. Pay attention to where it feels natural and where it feels forced. The opening must sound like something you would genuinely say, not something that looks good on the page. AI helps you identify direction and intent, but the final wording must fit your voice and your rhythm.
Developing the Body of Your Speech Using AI
The body of your speech is where understanding is built and trust is earned. This is where audiences decide whether your message holds together and whether you are worth listening to. AI can support this stage by helping you organise ideas, strengthen explanations, and maintain a clear line of reasoning throughout.
You can use AI to expand on individual points, pressure test whether they support your core message, or identify where ideas overlap unnecessarily. This is especially useful for spotting content that feels interesting but does not actually move the audience closer to the outcome you want.
Iteration is critical at this stage. Each pass through the content should reduce complexity rather than add to it. AI allows you to quickly explore alternative ways of explaining the same idea, making it easier to choose clarity over volume. The end result is a body that feels focused, intentional, and easier to remember and deliver with confidence.
Strengthening Stories and Examples With AI
Stories and examples are what bring your message to life, but only when they are well chosen and clearly structured. AI can help you brainstorm examples that align with your audience, industry, or context without drifting away from your core message.
You can also use AI to tighten the structure of your stories. Asking it to help clarify the setup, the key moment, and the insight ensures your story has a purpose rather than becoming a tangent. This is particularly useful for speakers who tend to over explain or include unnecessary detail.
That said, the final story must always be yours. AI cannot replace lived experience, judgment, or emotional truth. Its role is to support clarity and structure, not to manufacture authenticity. When your story is grounded in your experience and refined with intention, it becomes far more powerful.
Crafting a Clear and Purposeful Close With AI
The close is often where speeches fall apart. Speakers run out of time and end abruptly or throw away their close. AI can help you avoid this by making the close intentional rather than accidental.
You can use AI to explore different types of closes depending on your goal. This might include a clear call to action, a reflective question, a return to the opening idea, or a summary that reinforces what matters most. Seeing these options makes it easier to choose a close that aligns with the outcome you want from the audience.
A strong close creates resolution. It helps the audience understand why the speech mattered and what to do with it next. AI helps you design that final moment deliberately, so the speech ends with clarity rather than uncertainty. This will make it easier for the audience to do exactly what you want them to following your speech.
Editing and Refining Your Speech With AI
Editing is where many speakers unintentionally do the most damage. In the pursuit of perfection, clarity is often diluted and confidence is quietly undermined. Speakers keep tweaking language, refining sentences, and polishing phrasing until the speech no longer sounds like something they would naturally say. AI can support editing, but only when it is used with restraint, intention, and a clear understanding of what good public speaking actually requires.
The purpose of editing is not to impress on the page. It is to make the speech easier to understand, easier for the audience to remember, and easier for you to deliver under pressure. AI should be used to remove friction, reduce cognitive load, and clarify meaning. It should never be used to sand down personality or replace natural expression with artificial polish. When editing is done well, the speech feels lighter to hold in your head and easier to deliver in the room. AI can help you get there faster, but only if you stay in control of the process.
Polishing Without Losing Your Voice
AI can be great for identifying long sentences, repeated ideas, filler phrases, and unnecessary jargon. This makes it a useful tool for simplifying language and tightening phrasing, especially when a speech has become bloated through overthinking or over explaining. It can help you see where clarity has been compromised by complexity.
However, the danger comes when you keep polishing beyond usefulness. Language that looks elegant, refined, or clever on the page often sounds stiff or unnatural when spoken aloud. Public speaking is a spoken medium, not a written one. This is why reading your speech out loud is non negotiable. If a sentence feels awkward to say, requires too much breath, or sounds unlike you, it does not belong in the speech.
Your voice matters more than refinement. Audiences connect to people, not perfectly engineered sentences. Editing with AI should make your speech clearer, more confident, and easier to deliver, not more distant or scripted. Slight imperfection often creates more trust and relatability than flawless phrasing ever could.
What AI Can and Cannot Do When Writing Your Speech
Understanding the limits of AI is essential if you want to use it well. Those limits protect both your confidence and your credibility as a speaker. AI is a preparation tool, not a performance solution. When you are clear on where its role begins and ends, it becomes far more useful and far less risky. AI excels at structure, clarity, and exploration. It struggles with context, nuance, and human responsiveness. Knowing this prevents you from asking AI to do jobs that will be half baked.
The Limits of AI in Speech Writing
AI can’t account for the room you will be in, the energy of the audience, or the subtle adjustments that happen during live delivery. It can’t read facial expressions, sense disengagement, or respond to moments of silence. It also cannot anticipate interruptions, questions, or emotional reactions in real time.
AI also can’t replace familiarity with your material. Confidence in public speaking comes from knowing what you want to say well enough to adapt it on the spot. This is why using AI to produce full scripts you then try to memorize is such a common mistake. Memorization increases pressure, creates fragility, and pulls attention away from connection.
A speech should feel owned and internalized, not recited. When you rely on memorized AI generated scripts, you outsource confidence and lose flexibility. The result is often a delivery that feels tense and disconnected, even if the words are technically sound. You would be wasting your audiences time if you replace you with AI in the presentation and speech writing process.
Using AI to Prepare, Not Perform
AI is most powerful before you step up to speak. It helps you arrive clear on your message, confident in your structure, and intentional about your outcome. It supports thinking, organisation, and refinement so that your preparation time is used more effectively.
Once you are in the room, the responsibility is human. Delivery, presence, pacing, and connection cannot be delegated. When used well, AI reduces friction in writing without removing ownership. It sharpens thinking, speeds up preparation, and frees you to focus on delivery, presence, and engagement.
The outcome is not an AI written speech. It is a well prepared speaker who knows exactly what they want to say, why it matters, and how to land it with the audience.
TL;DR: How to Use AI to Write Your Speech
AI can help you write a clearer, more confident speech by supporting structure, ideas, and refinement without replacing your voice or the effort required to speak well.
Use AI to explore how to open and close your presentation and use relevant examples and stories for your audience, while staying in control of what makes it into your speech
Avoid full scripts and memorization by using AI to support clarity, not dictate delivery
Edit with AI to simplify language and remove friction, not to over polish or flatten your personality
Understand the limits of AI and keep responsibility for connection, context, and delivery human
When used intentionally, AI speeds up preparation and helps you arrive ready to speak with confidence and presence
More From Liam Sandford
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