The markup that turns a correct read into the read you wanted — bracketed directions, sound tags, timed pauses and phonetic spelling, and what each one actually changes.
Lesson 2 · core · 9 min read
Open Voice StudioEverything in this lesson is typed into the script itself. There is no separate performance panel — the direction, the pauses and the pronunciation live in the text, next to the words they apply to, which is why they survive copying a script from one project to another and why they are worth learning as writing rather than as settings.
Note
This is the lesson that changes what people think the tool is. A reader who leaves after lesson one has a text-to-speech box. A reader who finishes this one has a performance they directed — and the gap between those two is almost entirely bracket syntax.
There are six devices and they are all you get. That is a feature: a small vocabulary you know completely beats a large one you half-remember, and each of these does exactly one thing.
Every markup device, and what it changes.
A bracketed acting note at the very start of a line. It steers how the line is delivered and is never spoken. One per line, in English, lowercase, no punctuation — and it carries forward to the lines after it until another direction replaces it. It is the highest-leverage thing on this page: one bracket moves the whole read, where every other device adjusts a detail.
Recipe · paste as-is
Style description
[say quietly, with a slow pace] We are going to be fine.
Up to 120 characters inside the brackets. Go over and it stops being recognised as a direction — which means it gets read aloud. Write it descriptively — mood, pace and manner in one bracket — and avoid asking for two contradictory things at once, because a direction to read slowly and urgently resolves into neither.
Careful
Directions carry forward. A direction opens a passage and stays in force until a different one replaces it, so the way to end an emotional stretch is an explicit plain direction on the next segment — not leaving the brackets off, which changes nothing.
A non-verbal sound, dropped anywhere in a line. It renders as an actual sound rather than as spoken words, so it is the one bracket you can put mid-sentence. There are 6: [laugh], [sigh], [clear throat], [breathe], [cough] and [yawn]. Place one where a real reader would actually make that sound — after a hard line, before a difficult admission — and it reads as a person. Place one every third sentence and it reads as a machine imitating a person, which is worse than the flat version you started with.
Note
[chuckle], [gasp], [groan] still work if you type them — older scripts contain them — but they are not offered as chips, so they are the least reliable of the set.
Careful
A bracket at the very start of a line is read as a direction — unless what is inside it is one of the 6 sound tags, in which case it stays a sound. So a line opening with [laugh] gets a laugh, not a delivery instruction, and any other opening bracket steers the read instead of being spoken.
An explicit silence of a length you choose. Whole seconds render as seconds and fractions render as milliseconds, so a half-beat is as easy to ask for as a long one. Each pause is 0.1–10 seconds, and a single generation accepts 20 of them.
Recipe · paste as-is
Style description
Take a breath. <break time="1s"/> Now continue. <break time="500ms"/> Almost.
Reach for these only when punctuation cannot do it. A full stop, a comma and an em-dash already produce natural rests, and a script full of explicit break tags where commas would have done sounds mechanically spaced — the timing is too exact to be human.
Capitalise a word — or one syllable of it — to stress it. It works only inside the words you want spoken, never inside a direction, and it stops meaning anything if you use it on every other word. It works on part of a word as well as a whole one, which is the useful part: capitalising a single syllable stresses that syllable rather than shouting the word.
Recipe · paste as-is
Style description
We NEED this. AbsoLUTEly.
Capitals inside a direction do nothing — the bracket is an instruction, not speech. Emphasis belongs in the words you want spoken.
Phonetic spelling that replaces a word. You type IPA between slashes INSTEAD OF the word, not next to it — this is the fix for a name, a homograph, or a technical term the voice keeps getting wrong. This is the device that fixes the problem people give up on: a brand name, a surname, or a word that is spelled the same as another word and read as the wrong one.
The classic cases — one mispronounced word, three homographs.
Tip
Fix a pronunciation the first time you hear it wrong. A name read incorrectly in your second segment will be read incorrectly in your fortieth, and it is the same single token either way.
Not markup at all, and the reason most lines that need fixing do not need markup. Full stops and commas set the natural pauses, an em-dash adds a beat, and a paragraph break rests longer than any of them. Worth stating explicitly because it is the answer to most "how do I make it pause here" questions, and it is free: rewriting the sentence is usually a better fix than instrumenting it.
Getting a beat before a reveal
Making a line sound urgent
Stressing a point
Fixing a mispronounced surname
Everything above is typed into the script. These three are sliders, and they are worth knowing because two of them are routinely used to attempt something the markup does better.
Bounds as the studio enforces them.
How fast the voice reads. It changes pace without changing pitch, so a faster read still sounds like the same person — which is what makes it safe to nudge and unsafe to lean on. Moves the voice up or down in whole semitones. This belongs to the voice changer, not to reading typed text, and it is a transposition rather than a different performance. The gap left between one speaker and the next in a multi-voice script. It only appears once your script actually contains more than one voice, which is why you may never have seen it.
Careful
Speed is not a performance control. Pushing it to its ceiling makes a neutral read into a fast neutral read, not an excited one — and a listener hears the difference immediately. If you want energy, ask for energy in a direction and leave speed near its default.
Saying where a tool stops is more useful than another example of where it works, and these are the four requests that come back disappointed.
Tip
Change one thing per regeneration. Four edits at once tells you the line got better without telling you which edit did it — and the one that made no difference is now permanently in your script, being copied into the next one.
Questions
Free to start
Reading about a style description only gets you so far. The studio is free to use — write one sentence and hear what comes back.
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