Choosing a voice is only one part of making a product video easy to follow. The narration also needs to pronounce your product terms correctly, leave room for the action, and say exactly what the interface demonstrates.
Before commissioning a recording or generating an AI voiceover, prepare a short sample that contains the difficult part of your explanation. That will tell you more than hearing someone deliver your company name over a polished introduction.
Choose the sample that could expose a problem
Use a passage containing a feature name, a complete instruction and a result. If your product includes an abbreviation or an unfamiliar technical term, include that too. You want to learn how the voice handles the actual material, rather than whether it sounds pleasant on a generic sentence.
For a hypothetical deployment tool, the sample might say, 'Choose the staging environment, review the changes, then request approval.' That line lets you hear whether the voice separates the steps naturally and whether the final action sounds like a request rather than an immediate deployment.
This is an invented example for planning an audition. We haven't recorded or compared voices for it. Replace the wording with a verified task from your product and use the same sample when comparing options.
Describe the delivery through the situation
Instead of asking for a voice that is 'premium, bold and engaging,' explain who is listening and what they're trying to understand. A developer reviewing a release workflow needs a different delivery from someone watching a playful consumer app announcement.
Say where a pause would help and which words carry the distinction. In the deployment example, 'request approval' matters because it tells the viewer that another step remains. Emphasizing the product name repeatedly wouldn't clarify the workflow.
If you have a reference, explain the particular quality you want, such as a conversational pace or restrained emphasis. Don't expect the reference to communicate your pronunciation rules or the meaning of the product terms. Those need their own notes.
Prepare a pronunciation sheet with real decisions
List the names and abbreviations that could be read more than one way. Record whether an acronym should be spoken as a word or letter by letter. If your team has an approved pronunciation recording, provide it alongside a written explanation.
Keep the spelling people see on screen separate from the pronunciation guidance. A phonetic spelling may help the recording process but would look wrong in a caption. Make clear which text is for the speaker and which belongs in the published transcript.
If different people in the company say a term differently, resolve that before requesting a final take. Otherwise the voice artist or agent gets contradictory corrections and you end up comparing revisions against an agreement nobody actually made.
Review the narration against the scene, not only the script
Listen to the sample on its own to catch unclear words, then place it beside a rough version of the scene. A sentence can sound fine without pictures and become rushed when someone also has to find a small control.
When the timing feels wrong, decide whether the spoken line needs fewer words or the scene needs more time. Speeding up the entire recording can make a single crowded moment harder to understand. Similarly, a long pause after every sentence may slow the explanation without helping the important action.
Plan to describe essential visual information rather than relying on phrases like 'as you can see.' W3C's guidance covers incorporating necessary visual description into the main audio. For a product demo, naming the changed state can be more useful than merely announcing that something happened.
Ask how corrections will be handled
Before approving the voice, find out how you'll replace a line after the product team changes a label. Ask for the file arrangement your editor needs and whether the narration can be delivered separately from music. Those are project requirements to confirm, not features to assume every service includes.
For an AI workflow, inspect the available pronunciation and revision controls before committing. For a recorded voice, agree on how to identify pickups and match the surrounding delivery. In either case, send the whole sentence and its context when requesting a correction.
Sample passage: Choose staging, review the changes, then request approval. Audience: Developers learning this release workflow. Meaning to preserve: Requesting approval does not deploy the change. Pronunciation notes: Add approved product terms here. Scene cue: Pause long enough to locate the environment selector. Delivery requested: Clear, conversational explanation. Files requested: Narration separately from background music. Revision question: How will we replace this line if the control name changes?
Approve the final audio after it has been assembled
Listen to the exported mix on the kind of device people will use, not only through studio headphones. Check whether background music hides a word and whether the beginning or ending cuts into the narration.
Then compare the delivered words with the approved script and update captions from what was actually said. A small pickup can leave the transcript describing the earlier version if nobody checks the two together.
Keep the pronunciation notes and the accepted recording with the project. The next revision should start from those decisions, rather than asking everyone to remember which version of the voiceover sounded right.