
Cass
Seventeen and furious about it, in a good way
Voice category
Teen characters carry most of young-adult fiction, anime and school-set drama, and they are the easiest to get wrong — cast too young and it reads as a cartoon, too old and the whole premise collapses. These are the youngest characters in the library, played by adult voices directed young — they read closer to seventeen than to fourteen, and that is the honest range to write for.

Cass
Seventeen and furious about it, in a good way

Koji
Rival with a two-word maximum per sentence

Aria
The one who volunteers before thinking

Tess
Dry, flat, nothing impresses her
Every voice is available on every plan — the library is not a paywall.
No account needed. Type one line, choose who says it, and listen.
Adolescent voices are physically distinct from both child and adult voices — the range has settled but the resonance has not, and speech patterns are faster and more clipped than either neighbouring band. Synthetic speech has mostly skipped this band, offering something childlike and something adult and little between, which is why so much amateur YA audio has teenagers who sound thirty.
Here every voice is an adult one, directed younger for the teen characters: they read as youthful rather than as an actual sixteen-year-old, and no setting closes that last bit of distance. So the work of sounding sixteen falls on the dialogue — shorter turns, more interruptions, less settled phrasing. Written that way, a scene reads as young even from a voice that would otherwise read as twenty.
Young-adult fiction runs on posture: the character who deflects with jokes, the one who says nothing, the one who is relentlessly sincere and embarrassing about it. These read as distinct people in prose because you can see their word choices. In audio they read as distinct only if the voices carry different default energy.
Set each character's resting emotion once, then direct the exceptions line by line. The emotional arc of most YA scenes is one long neutral stretch and two lines that break it, and marking exactly those two lines is more effective than pushing the whole scene towards drama.
The three that dominate are anime and manga fan audio, original-character scenes shared in art and writing communities, and vertical short drama, where school-set stories are one of the highest-volume genres worldwide. All three are produced fast, in volume, usually by one person, and all three benefit from being able to re-render a scene after a rewrite instead of scheduling a session.
Visual novels are a fourth, slightly different case: there the teen voices carry hundreds of short branching lines rather than continuous scenes, and a stable cast matters more than direction, because consistency across branches is what players notice.
Synthetic teen voices are convincing in conversation and less convincing at extremes. Shouting across a room, crying mid-sentence, laughing while talking — these are physical events, and the models approximate rather than reproduce them. Write around the extremes where you can, and where you cannot, consider recording those specific lines yourself and cutting them in.
This is not a permanent limitation, but it is the current one, and it is better to plan around it than to be surprised by it in the final mix.
Fifteen and nineteen are different instruments. Decide which end of adolescence your character sits at, then audition the library characters tagged for that age.
Teen scenes are group scenes — friends, a rival, an adult who does not understand. Cast them together so the ensemble balance is visible from the first render.
Most teen characters have a resting register: bored, eager, guarded. Set it as the character's default emotion so you only have to direct the exceptions.
Young-adult writing lives on the moment the armour drops. Mark those specific lines as sad or whispered and leave everything around them neutral — contrast does the work.
Your audience is listening on phone speakers or cheap earbuds. Check the mix there before you publish; high, bright voices behave differently on small drivers.
Nothing is pitched up. The teen characters are adult voices performing young, directed towards the age the character is written at, which reads more easily as seventeen than as fourteen. The remaining tell is phrasing: if you write long, formally structured sentences, any voice will read as older than intended.
Write slang as ordinary words and it will be spoken naturally. Abbreviations are riskier — some are read as words and some spelled out, and which one you get depends on the abbreviation. Check them once and, where it matters, write the abbreviation out the way it should be said.
All forty characters perform in nine languages, so a school-set scene works in any of them, and the ceiling is the same everywhere: ten base voices, so ten speakers in one project before two of them share a voice. A six-to-eight-character classroom fits comfortably inside that.
For first-person YA, yes, and it is a common choice — the narrator is the protagonist, so a teen voice is the correct one. Just budget more editing time: bright voices are less forgiving over an hour than a warm mid-range narrator.
Separate them by pace and attitude rather than by pitch. Two voices with the same energy will blur no matter how far apart their pitch is, whereas a fast eager voice and a slow guarded one stay separate even when they are close in tone.
Avoid sexualised content involving characters written as minors — it is against our terms regardless of how the audio is made, and accounts that generate it are closed.
Paste a script, let CastDub assign a voice to every character, and export a finished drama.
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