Dialogue that reads beautifully on the page doesn't always perform well out loud — and this is especially true when an AI voice is reading it verbatim, without the intuitive adjustments a human actor would make automatically. A few practical writing habits make a real difference in how natural the final audio sounds.
Write closer to how people actually talk
Formal, grammatically complete sentences are common in written prose and less common in real speech. Real conversation is full of sentence fragments, interruptions, and restarts. Dialogue written to mimic that — even slightly — tends to sound more natural when read aloud than dialogue written like polished prose.
Keep lines shorter where possible
Long, multi-clause lines of dialogue are harder for any narration — human or AI — to deliver with natural pacing. Breaking a long line into two shorter exchanges, even between the same speaker's continuous thought, often reads more naturally out loud than one long unbroken sentence.
Avoid over-explaining through dialogue
Exposition-heavy dialogue — characters explaining things to each other that they'd both already know, purely for the audience's benefit — tends to sound especially stilted when performed aloud, since the artificiality of the exposition becomes much more obvious with a voice attached to it than it is on the page.
Use performance directives deliberately, not everywhere
Markers like *whispering* or *angry* before a line can meaningfully shape delivery — but if every line carries one, the effect flattens out and stops feeling purposeful. Reserve them for the lines where tone genuinely needs to shift, and let neutral lines read at the character's baseline delivery.
Read it aloud yourself first
Before converting a scene, read the dialogue aloud yourself, even quietly. Any line that trips you up as a human reader is very likely to sound awkward from an AI voice too — this simple check catches more issues than any formatting rule.