How to Use Chat GPT to Improve Your Public Speaking
Liam Sandford
Liam Sandford is a Head of Marketing, public speaking expert, and 2x Best Selling Author including the book Effortless Public Speaking. He helps ambitious professionals and entrepreneurs communicate with impact to get noticed, grow their career, and build their business.
Most people open Chat GPT to write an email or settle an argument. Fewer use it for the thing it is quietly very good at: taking the friction out of preparing to speak. I have leaned on it for exactly that since 2022, when it first landed, both for my own speaking and with the speakers I have coached, and the lesson has held the whole time. Chat GPT is a thinking partner, not a replacement. It will not make you a confident speaker. It will get you to the start line faster, with your ideas in order, so you can spend your energy on the part that matters: how you make a room feel.
A quick word on what it cannot do, because it shapes everything below. It cannot feel a room, read a face, or deliver a line. Left alone it drifts towards safe, generic language and will state a wrong fact as smoothly as a right one. So you do the thinking and the judging, and you let it speed up the donkey work. Used that way, it is one of the best preparation tools a speaker has ever had. Chat GPT is one part of a wider AI workflow for public speaking, and this article will show you how to go about getting the most out of it.
Before any of the prompts, hold onto the principle the whole craft hangs on: it is not about you, it is about your audience. Every prompt you write should be in service of the people in the room, not your ego. Keep that front of mind and Chat GPT becomes a genuinely useful partner rather than a machine for generating your presentation for you.
Provide Context to Get High Quality AI Responses
The first rule is simple: the quality of what you put in decides the quality of what you get out. A vague prompt gets a vague answer, and a vague answer is worse than useless because it sounds plausible while helping nobody. Give Chat GPT clear, specific context and the suggestions come back relevant, usable, and shaped around your actual audience.
Be Specific in Your Prompts
The fastest way to get better output is to write better instructions. I keep four things in every speaking prompt: a role, a task, the context, and the format I want back. Tell it who to be (a communication coach, a sceptical audience member), exactly what to do, the background it needs (audience, topic, time, setting), and how to hand the answer back.
Here is a worked example:
"Act as a communication coach. I am giving a 10 minute presentation to university students on building speaking confidence. Suggest an engaging open that is not an agenda, three short stories that could carry the main point, and one clear close. Keep each suggestion to two lines."
That single prompt does more than a page of "give me ideas for my speech" ever will, because it names the role, the audience, the format, and the constraint. The output is something you can react to instead of a wall of generic advice.
Tell It to Be Brutally Honest
This is the prompt most people never use, and the one I use most. Once you have a draft you are happy with, paste it back in and say: "Act as a sceptical member of my audience. Tell me where this loses you, where it sounds generic, and which claim you do not believe." The first time you do this it stings, because the model stops being polite and starts being useful. You get a short list of the exact weak spots, and fixing those three or four things does more for the presentation than another hour spent polishing the parts that were already fine.
Refine Specific Presentation Elements with Chat GPT
Chat GPT works best on parts, not the whole. Ask it to write your entire speech and you get something smooth, forgettable, and not yours. Point it at one element at a time, the open, the close, an example, a story, and it earns its place. These are the moments that carry the most weight, so they are where a little help goes furthest.
Enhance Your Opening
Your open sets the tone for everything that follows, and the worst possible start is an agenda, which simply gives the audience permission to think about something else. A strong open earns attention in the first few seconds. I think of it like a James Bond film, which drops you straight into the action rather than easing in gently. Ask Chat GPT for several openings built on a short story, a surprising statistic, or a sharp question, then pick the one that sounds like you.
A prompt I use:
"Give me 5 ways to open a 10 minute presentation on speaking confidence for a student audience. No agenda. Each should start with a short story, a surprising statistic, or a question, in under 30 words."
Sharpen Your Close and Call to Action
A weak close wastes a strong presentation. Most people end on "any questions?", which invites the hardest one in the room and leaves the audience with nothing to do. There is a better close, the one I coached speakers to use: tell them the one thing you want them to do next, then hand over with "here is what I plan to do next, what would you advise?" It opens a conversation without exposing you. Chat GPT is good at generating closing options once you tell it the exact outcome you want.
A prompt I use:
"I want my audience to commit to one small speaking rep this week. Give me three ways to close a 10 minute presentation that lead to that action without sounding pushy."
Generate Audience Specific Examples
A concrete example makes a point stick, and the right example depends entirely on who is in front of you. Chat GPT can adapt the same idea for students, executives, or first time speakers in seconds. Feed it the audience and ask for examples they would recognise, then choose the ones that match your own experience.
A prompt I use:
"Give me 5 examples that show introverts can be excellent speakers, pitched for a student audience who think confidence means being loud."
Treat whatever comes back as raw material. The suggestions are a starting point, never the finished article, and the moment you swap in your own story is the moment the example becomes yours.
Use Chat GPT to Rehearse and Practise Your Delivery
Writing the words is only half the job. Rehearsal is where confidence is built, because confidence is success remembered, and the more recent reps you can recall, the calmer you feel on the day. Chat GPT cannot watch you, but it can role play, pressure test, and help you structure practice so your reps count.
Simulate Audience Questions
Questions are the part most speakers dread, so practise them. Ask Chat GPT to play your audience and fire the hardest questions at your material, then rehearse your answers out loud. It will not catch your body language, but it will surface the questions you have been quietly avoiding.
A prompt I use:
"Role play a sceptical professional audience at a session on stage fright. Ask me 10 challenging questions, one at a time, and wait for my answer before the next."
One thing no prompt can give you: the answer for the question you genuinely cannot answer. Here, honesty wins. I used to try to bluff and feel terrible afterwards. Now the line is simply "I will take a look and get back to you", and then I follow through. Audiences respect that, and it hands you a reason to reconnect later.
Test Speech Timing and Flow
Pace and order keep a room with you, and transitions are where a presentation is won or lost. Ask Chat GPT to help you sequence your points, suggest where a pause earns its place, and flag where the structure drags. You are not handing over the structure, you are stress testing the one you have.
A prompt I use:
"Here is my running order for a 10 minute presentation. Tell me where the energy drops, where two points are doing the same job, and where a transition is missing."
Explore Delivery Styles
The same content lands differently as a story, a persuasive case, or a step by step walkthrough. Ask Chat GPT to reframe a section in two or three styles so you can feel which one suits you and the room. The goal is to find a delivery that fits your personality, not to perform someone else's.
Refine Language and Storytelling for Maximum Impact
Clear beats clever. A confused audience is a lost audience, so the job of language is to make your point land, not to make you sound smart. Chat GPT is a strong editor for exactly this, as long as you keep your own voice in the driving seat.
Simplify Complex Ideas
If you can say it in 5 words, do not use 10. Technical or abstract points lose a room fast, and Chat GPT is good at cutting them down to something a tired audience at the end of the day can follow. Ask it to simplify, then read the result aloud and put your own phrasing back in where it sounds like a machine.
A prompt I use:
"Rewrite this explanation of speaking anxiety in plain, spoken English for a student audience. Short sentences. No jargon."
Experiment with Storytelling Frameworks
People do not remember what you said, they remember how you made them feel, as Carl Buehner put it. Stories are how you make them feel something, and they do not need to be dramatic. A few techniques do the heavy lifting: open with a bang, engage the senses so the audience can picture the scene, and tell the story of a change, from how things were to how they became. Ask Chat GPT to retell a flat example using one of these, then make the words your own.
A prompt I use:
"Take this dull example about a nervous first presentation and retell it three ways: as a before and after change, with sensory detail, and opening on the most dramatic moment."
AI can also shape a flat example into a story that lands, or push you towards fresh ideas worth speaking about.
Where Chat GPT Falls Short (and How to Stay in Control)
The fastest way to ruin a good presentation with Chat GPT is to let it write the whole thing and then try to memorise it. I learned the danger of scripts the hard way years ago: I leaned entirely on a written script for a work presentation, forgot a single word, and could not recover. A word for word AI script is the same trapdoor, only quicker to fall into. Use Chat GPT to shape ideas and structure, not to hand you a script to read.
Two more traps worth naming. The first is its confident wrongness: it will invent a statistic or a quote and present it without a flicker of doubt, so verify anything factual before it goes near a slide. The second is its instinct to flatten your voice into smooth, safe, corporate language. Read everything aloud, cut any line you would never say, and put your own examples back in. Chat GPT can prepare you. It cannot be you, and the moment a room senses a machine talking, you have lost them. Leaning on it that way is one of the common mistakes that quietly flatten a presentation.
Actionable Takeaways for AI Enhanced Public Speaking
Treat it as an assistant, not the speaker. Your judgement, stories, and personality stay at the centre.
Load every prompt with context. Role, task, audience, and format turn generic answers into usable ones.
Use the brutally honest pass. Ask it to attack your draft as a sceptic, then fix the weak spots it finds.
Refine parts, not the whole. The open, the close, examples, and stories gain most from a second brain.
Verify and humanise everything. Check the facts, read it aloud, and rewrite anything that does not sound like you.
Chat GPT is rarely the only AI tool worth a speaker's time, and the same care applies when you write the whole speech.
FAQs for Using Chat GPT for Public Speaking
Can Chat GPT write my speech for me?
It can produce a draft, but you should not deliver it as written. AI scripts read smoothly and die in the room, and trying to memorise one piles on pressure. Use it for structure and options, then write the final version in your own words.
What is the best prompt for public speaking?
There is no single magic prompt. The reliable pattern is role, task, context, and format: tell Chat GPT who to be, exactly what you want, the audience and setting, and how to hand the answer back. The more specific you are, the less editing you do.
Is it cheating to use Chat GPT to prepare a presentation?
No more than using a notebook or asking a colleague to read your draft. It is a thinking partner. The ideas, the judgement, and the delivery are still yours, and the audience only ever connects with the human part.
Can Chat GPT help with speaking nerves?
Indirectly, yes. Most nerves come from feeling underprepared, so anything that gets your structure clear and lets you rehearse tough questions earlier helps you feel ready. That is largely how AI eases public speaking anxiety: less by magic and more by preparation.
TL;DR: How to Use Chat GPT to Improve Your Public Speaking
Chat GPT is a preparation partner for speakers, strongest before you open your mouth and weakest the moment you ask it to be you.
Specific prompts win. Give it a role, the task, your audience, and the format you want back.
Point it at parts of the presentation, the open, close, examples and stories, never the whole script.
Make it earn its keep with the sceptic's pass: ask it to attack your draft, then fix what it flags.
Rehearse with it by role playing tough questions, but answer the impossible one with honesty, not bluff.
Always verify the facts and rewrite in your own voice, because a room can feel a machine instantly.
More From Liam Sandford
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