VoicePro: Professional Recordings for Your Phone System

You can, and the reason it usually sounds wrong is technical rather than a matter of taste. A call from the public network is carried in the telephone band, roughly 300 Hz to 3.4 kHz, and compressed on top of that. A phone recording made in a working office carries room reverb, air handling and a level that moves between sentences, and the codec removes exactly the frequencies that would have made those read as a normal room, so what reaches the caller sounds like a problem with the line. A studio recording is close-miked, dry and level-controlled, so the voice is the part that survives. If you only pay for one recording, make it the greeting.

Avoid naming a date unless the caller genuinely needs it. "We are closed today and open again at nine tomorrow" is still true next year; "closed until the 2nd of January" stops being true on the 3rd and carries on playing anyway. The same applies to years, seasons and anything phrased as currently. Record a general closure message alongside the specific ones so there is always something correct to fall back on, and keep the dated wording for the closures you can genuinely predict. Which recording plays on which day is a routing question rather than a scripting one.

It depends which kind you want. A recording made with one of the AI voices is generated inside the tool and there is no limit on how many you make, so a closure message is a script you write rather than a slot you book. A recording by a human voice artist is a production job and takes as long as that implies, which is the practical argument for spending it on the pieces that rarely change. Plan the greeting and the menu prompts in advance, and treat closure messages as something that can be produced on the day.

Technically yes, legally it depends. Playing a commercial recording to callers is a music licensing matter rather than a phone system one, and the position varies with the track and with how it is being used. The licence-free library exists so that this stops being a question you have to answer: you pick something that fits and nothing further is owed to anyone. If you want a specific commercial track, establish where you stand on licensing before it goes on the system rather than after.

More than 50 languages and dialects, over 350 professional voice artists, and AI voices for anything you expect to change regularly. There is also a library of over 10,000 pre-scripted messages to use as they are or edit, which is usually quicker than writing from scratch. The choice that matters more than which voice you pick is using the same one everywhere. A greeting from one artist, a menu from another and an out-of-hours message recorded on somebody's phone is the combination that sounds unplanned, even when two of the three are good.

For most of these recordings, yes, and it beats the realistic alternative, which is a message nobody updates because updating it means arranging a recording. Use it for closures, temporary notices and seasonal hours, where being current matters more than being polished. For the main greeting, which every single caller hears, a human artist is usually still worth the extra step. Either way, listen to it saying your company name and your town before it goes live, because unusual business names and British place names are where synthesis most often gets the pronunciation wrong.

Send them over and we will listen before suggesting anything. If a greeting was recorded properly and still says something true there is no reason to redo it, and keeping it means the voice your regular callers already know does not change. What usually needs replacing is everything around it — the menu prompts, the closed message, the hold audio — because those are the ones that were done in a hurry. Tell us what you want to keep before anything is scripted, since matching later recordings to an existing voice is the harder half of the job.

Probably still yes, and possibly more so. Menus are the recordings people think of, but a business with no menu at all still has a greeting, an out-of-hours message and something playing on hold, and between them those cover more of the week than a menu would have. Having no menu makes the greeting matter more rather than less, because it is doing the whole job of the first impression on its own.