The elephant in the room
Can AI write your speech?
Let’s be honest: you’ve probably already wondered whether ChatGPT could just knock out your speech for free. So let me save you the gamble, because I’ve spent a long time putting it to the test, and the answer matters more than you’d think.
The short answer: it can produce words. It can’t write a speech.
AI is genuinely brilliant at some things. Writing a speech that lands in a room full of real people is not one of them. Fed your details, it does exactly what you’d fear: it lists the facts in the order you gave them, dispatches the person who matters most in a single sentence, and reaches for the same tired phrasing as everyone else who typed the same prompt.
And then there’s the bit that actually matters at a wedding or a dinner, the humour. This is where AI doesn’t just struggle; it’s the wrong tool entirely. It cannot be funny. It produces lines that look like jokes but die on contact with an audience, and nothing lives longer in the memory than a gag the robot promised would work, met by a sea of blank faces.
Where AI falls down
- Humour. The whole job of most speeches, and the one thing AI simply cannot do. Original, warm, room-appropriate funny is a human skill.
- Your story. AI can only rearrange what you feed it. It can’t spot the small, telling detail that makes a speech unmistakably about this person and no one else.
- Reading the room. Grandparents, exes, in-laws, the family history. AI has no idea what’s touching, what’s risky, and what will land you in trouble.
- Voice and length. It writes everyone the same, in a tone no real person uses, and can’t judge how long is too long. Yours should sound like you, not a knight of the Round Table.
What you get from a human
I started as a journalist, spent fifteen years in television, and have written speeches professionally since 2012, making me the UK’s most highly rated and reviewed speechwriter. I’ll find the story only you can tell, judge every laugh for the actual room, and write it in your voice so it sounds like the best possible version of you. Unlimited revisions, no templates, and not a single line written by a machine.
I’m not anti-technology, I’m a fan of it. But some things humans will always do better, and making a room full of people laugh, and then reach for a tissue, is right at the top of that list.
Good to know
Honest questions about AI & speeches
Isn’t AI free, though?
It is, and so is the result you get: a generic, list-like speech that no one laughs at. A speech only happens once. The cost of getting it wrong, in a room full of the people who matter most, is a lot higher than the price of getting it right.
Will anyone actually know it was written by AI?
Yes. AI speeches have a tell, a flat, slightly corporate sameness, jokes that aren’t jokes, and a habit of sounding like everyone else’s. Guests can’t always name it, but they feel it: the room stays quiet where it should have laughed.
Do you use AI to speed things up?
No. Every speech I write is written by me, from scratch, around your stories. I’ve tested the tools thoroughly precisely so I can tell you, hand on heart, that yours is 100% human and 100% yours.
So what can a human do that AI can’t?
Find the story only you can tell. Judge what’s funny and what’s too far. Read the room, the family, the history. Land a joke. Build to a moment that makes people well up. AI arranges words; it doesn’t understand people.
Don’t leave the most memorable words of the day to a robot
Tell me about your occasion and I’ll write you something genuinely, unmistakably yours.