Korean AI Voices

Speech level is a relationship, not a politeness setting

Almost every Korean sentence ends by declaring the speaker's relationship to the listener. 합쇼체 and 해요체 and 해체 and 한다체 are not degrees of a courtesy dial; they are four different social positions, and a listener reads them before they process the content. Two characters who speak 존댓말 to each other are not the same two characters after they switch to 반말, and the moment of that switch — 우리 말 놓자 — is a scene, not a formatting change.

Everything above is in the text. Nothing in the casting layer touches it and nothing should: keep the same voice across the switch, because the whole effect depends on the voice staying constant while the endings change. A translator who flattens the levels into uniform politeness has removed the plot, and no voice will put it back.

The titles are doing the work pronouns do in English

선배, 후배, 언니, 오빠, 형, 누나, 선생님, and the -씨 and -님 suffixes encode age gap, closeness and professional standing. English translations routinely replace them with names, which is why translated Korean dialogue so often feels flatter than the original — the relationships have quietly been deleted. In an audio script they are worth keeping even when the surrounding prose is in another language.

They are read as written. The decision is yours: whether a character says 지현아 or 지현 씨 or 선배 tells the listener where they stand, and it is worth going through your script once with only that question in mind before you cast anyone.

Ten voices, and no children

Ten distinct voices is workable for web-novel narration and short-form drama, where scenes usually run two to four speakers, and thin for a large ensemble. Free allows two cast members and Basic five, so the ceiling is reached only on Plus and Pro, where cast size is uncapped. Ten is not a Korean number — it is the same ten in every language on the site — and each library character sits on one of them and is separated from the others by persona and by the direction on each line. The accent is standard Seoul-register Korean; satoori is not something you can ask for, so a Busan character has to be written rather than cast. Audition your lead on a line of your own before you commit to a series.

There are no children's voices in Korean, and none in any other language here. A child character is performed by an adult voice playing young, which is how animation casts children — a boy is often played by a woman. Given how much Korean short drama turns on family scenes, this is the limitation most likely to affect real projects, and the workable adaptation is to write young roles as teenagers.

A scene, cast line by line

Six lines in a workroom, three speakers, all of them characters from this page. The Korean is the script; the notes after each line are what we would cast and how we would direct it. Cass is the junior, Ezra is a year or two above her, Kestrel runs the place.

Cass: 선배, 이거 제가 해도 돼요? — Senior, can I do this one? Cass is the seventeen-year-old in the library and fits a junior asking for work. Her whole social position is in 선배 and in the 해요체 ending, and nothing you pick in the cast list adds or removes it. Neutral.

Ezra: 네가 하면 내가 할 게 없잖아. — If you do it there's nothing left for me. Ezra answers in 반말, which tells a Korean listener the two of them are close, not that he is rude. Neutral again. The asymmetry — she speaks up, he speaks down — is the information, and a preset on either line would blur it.

Cass: 그러니까 선배는 선배 일 하세요. — Then you do your own work, senior. 하세요 is still polite and the line is still a push-back, which is exactly what translation usually loses. Mark this one happy if you have line-by-line emotion, which is a Pro control: it is teasing, not defiance.

Kestrel: 둘 다 앉아. 오늘은 내가 한다. — Both of you sit. Today I'm doing it. Kestrel takes 반말 to both of them, which places her above both. Neutral, and 0.9× on Plus or Pro. An order does not need a preset.

Ezra: ……선생님이 하시면 저희가 더 불편해요. — If you do it, we're the ones who feel awkward. Ezra switches to 존댓말 two lines after speaking 반말, because the listener changed rather than the speaker. Keep the same voice across that switch — the whole effect depends on the voice staying put while the endings move.

Kestrel: 알아. 그래서 하는 거야. — I know. That's why I'm doing it. Neutral. If it lands flat, regenerate rather than redirect: a second take of a short Korean line differs noticeably, and one of the two is usually the one you wanted.

Three speakers, three of the ten base voices, standard Seoul-register Korean because that is the only register on offer — satoori is not something you can ask for. Everything that made this scene legible, from 선배 to who says 하세요 to whom, was written before anyone was cast.

What to listen for before you export

Exporting spends download credits and re-exporting the same project spends them again, so listen once to the assembled scene. Six things catch Korean out more often than the rest.

Speech level, pair by pair. Play the mixed file and track each relationship: does anyone drift between 존댓말 and 반말 where the script did not intend it? It is almost always a script error, and the script is where it is fixed.

Numbers. Korean runs two number systems and the digits say nothing about which one a sentence wanted: 세 시 삼십 분, 열 명, 이천이십육 년. Write the reading in hangul anywhere a number is spoken, and audition every age, time and count.

Sino-Korean homographs. Words built from hanja carry several meanings on one spelling, and what you are listening for is whether the sentence still means what you wrote. Rewriting so that only one reading fits is more reliable than respelling.

Titles and suffixes. 선배, 오빠, 선생님, and the -씨 and -님 endings. The commonest failure is not a wrong reading but a rushed one — the title disappears into the sentence. Where one carries weight, give it its own line for that character and the short gap does it.

Spacing. Korean 띄어쓰기 is a genuine lever here: a long noun phrase that came out as one blur usually untangles when the spaces sit where the meaning breaks. If a phrase makes you stumble reading it aloud, respace it before you re-cast anything.

Loanwords. English written in hangul is Korean and comes out Korean. English written in Latin letters inside a Korean line is a coin toss. Write it in hangul when you want the Korean reading, and leave it in Latin only when the character really would switch languages.