Learn how to clone, tune, and fix your AI voice in HeyGen, from recording tips to voice director, tags, mirroring, and brand glossary.
If your avatar looks great but sounds a bit…meh, this one’s for you.
In this Bootcamp session, the team covered how to create a professional digital twin in HeyGen. This session went one level deeper: how to give that avatar a voice that actually feels like you.
Here’s a breakdown of what Adam Halper and John Wu shared about perfecting your AI voice in HeyGen.
Why your AI voice matters so much
HeyGen avatars are audio driven.
That means the audio you feed the system is what drives:
- Your mouth shapes
- Your facial micro-expressions
- The overall “energy” of the performance
If the voice is flat and monotone, your avatar will look dull and lifeless, no matter how good your video training footage was. If the voice is expressive and well recorded, your avatar suddenly feels natural, confident, and alive.
So if you want high quality visuals, you actually start with a high quality voice clone.
Two ways to clone your voice in HeyGen
HeyGen gives you two main paths:
- Voice cloned automatically from your avatar footage
- A standalone instant voice clone, recorded just for audio
1. Voice from your avatar footage
When you upload video to create a digital twin, HeyGen automatically:
- Trains the visual model (how you look and move)
- And creates a voice clone from that same video
This is often the best option because:
- It’s effortless (no extra steps)
- The ambient sound matches your environment
- for example, subtle room tone or gentle background noise can make your avatar feel more grounded in the scene
However, the way you record great video (standing further from the mic, focusing on framing and lighting) is not always the way you get the cleanest audio.
So sometimes you love how you look, but you’re not thrilled with how you sound. That’s where option two comes in.
2. Standalone instant voice clone
If you want a more controlled, voice-first recording, use HeyGen’s instant voice clone.
You’ll get the best results if you:
Use a good mic (or your phone properly)
- A decent microphone is ideal
- Or use your smartphone with the mic held about 6 inches from your mouth
- On iPhone, record in Voice Memos and set audio quality to “lossless” in settings
Record in a quiet space
- Avoid loud background noise and echo
- Some light ambient noise is okay, but your voice should clearly dominate
Choose the right script
Pick text that matches how you’ll actually use your avatar:
- Doing TikTok-style product ads? Record a short ad-style script
- Teaching long-form lessons? Record a section of a lecture
- Onboarding customers? Use a welcome script or explanation
The closer the training script is to your real use case, the better the style / tone of your final voice.
Include accent markers
If you have a distinctive accent, consciously include words that show it off:
- Regional expressions
- Words where your vowel or R sounds are unique
You can even paste your script into an LLM and ask it to rewrite with more “accent markers” while keeping your meaning.
Be extra expressive
This is the big one.
Voice cloning tends to flatten tone a bit. If you record neutral, you’ll often get very neutral back. So when you record:
- Add more energy than you normally would
- Use clear rises and falls in your speech
- Smile when appropriate (you can hear it)
Aim for “your most expressive natural self.”
Shaping how your avatar delivers lines in AI Studio
Once you have a good core voice clone, HeyGen gives you several tools in AI Studio to control how your avatar speaks.
Voice Director: Set the overall mood
Voice Director lets you control the scene-level emotion and delivery.
You can:
- Choose presets like “excited” or “calm”
- Or add a custom instruction like:
- “Say this sarcastically”
- “Deliver this like a motivational coach”
- “Speak gently and reassuringly”
This is perfect when you want to set the tone for the entire scene without micro-managing every word.
Voice tags with ElevenLabs V3: Line-by-line control
For more precise control, HeyGen offers voice tags powered by the ElevenLabs V3 engine.
You can:
- Turn on the ElevenLabs V3 engine for a voice
- Click enhance and have HeyGen automatically insert tags based on your script
- Tweak or add your own tags to control things like:
- Emphasis
- Laughing
- Whispering
- Speaking more slowly or more intensely
Tags generally last until the next tag, so you can shape entire phrases or single words.
A few tips:
- Tags work best when they match the script’s emotion
- “excited” on a genuinely exciting moment works great
- “excited” on a sad sentence will confuse the model
- Always preview with the play button before generating the full video
- If it sounds off, click regenerate for that line until you get a take you like
Voice Mirroring: Your performance, avatar’s voice
Sometimes you know exactly how you want a line to sound.
Voice Mirroring lets you:
- Record or upload your own performance
- Have the avatar mimic your tone, pacing, and rhythm
- But speak in the avatar’s voice
This is especially useful for:
- Tagline lines in marketing videos
- Emotional phrases where timing really matters
- Signature intros or outros you want to nail perfectly
Most users don’t need mirroring for every line, but it’s a powerful “precision tool” when you care about a specific moment.
Common voice problems (and how to fix them)
John walked through three of the most frequent complaints and what to do about them.
1. “The voice doesn’t sound like me”
This usually shows up as:
- The accent feels wrong
- The pitch feels off (too high / too low)
What to try:
- Test different engines (for example, some models handle tricky accents better than others)
- Re-record your voice clone:
- Better mic or closer phone distance
- Quieter room
- More expressive delivery
- Make sure your script includes strong accent markers
2. “The voice is inconsistent”
Symptoms:
- Accent seems to shift mid-script
- Speed randomly speeds up or slows down in a way that feels unnatural
What to do:
- Regenerate, regenerate, regenerate
- HeyGen doesn’t charge extra credits for text-to-speech regenerations
- Use the regenerate voice option for a line or scene without changing the text
- Let the system keep the same script and try again until it stabilizes
Under the hood, HeyGen already does a lot to keep voices consistent across scenes. Regeneration is your main tool if a line goes weird.
3. “It’s pronouncing this word wrong”
This is very common for:
- Brand names
- Product names
- Acronyms
- URLs
HeyGen’s brand glossary is built for this.
You can:
- Highlight the problem word in your script
- Type out how you want it to sound, phonetically
- Preview the pronunciation
- Save it to your glossary
Once saved:
- That pronunciation is applied to every instance of that word in the script
- And it persists for future videos too
Fix it once, keep it forever.
Voice Doctor: An easier way to debug
To make all this simpler, HeyGen is rolling out a feature called Voice Doctor.
The idea:
- You describe what feels wrong with your audio
- Voice Doctor analyzes your setup and gives targeted recommendations
- It may suggest:
- A different engine
- Re-recording tips
- Script adjustments
- Or using tools like brand glossary or Voice Director
Think of it like an in-product “voice coach” baked into AI Studio.
Advanced: Using your ElevenLabs voice in HeyGen
If you already have a professional voice clone on ElevenLabs, you can bring it into HeyGen and use it with your avatars.
At a high level, the workflow is:
- Create an API key in your ElevenLabs account with the right permissions
- In AI Studio, open the voice panel
- Click new voice → integrate third party voice
- Paste your API key
- Select which ElevenLabs voices to import
Once imported, those voices simply appear in your HeyGen voice list, just like any other voice, and can be used with your avatars.
For most creators, the built-in voice cloning is more than enough. But if you’ve already invested heavily in ElevenLabs, this keeps everything connected.
A simple way to get started today
If you’re just getting into AI voices and all of this feels like a lot, here’s the simplest possible path:
- Create your avatar in HeyGen
- Upload good training footage
- Let HeyGen auto-clone your voice from that video
- Make a short test video
- One scene, simple script
- See how you look and sound
- If you like the voice, keep going
- Use Voice Director for scene-level emotion
- Optionally sprinkle in voice tags on key lines
- If you don’t like the voice, create a standalone clone
- Record 30–60 seconds of expressive speech with your phone close to your mouth
- Upload it via “create new voice → instant voice clone”
- Assign that voice to your avatar
- Fix small issues as they appear
- Brand glossary for stubborn words
- Regenerate for weird lines
- Voice Mirroring for critical phrases
Once you’ve done this a couple of times, you’ll have a digital twin that looks like you and sounds like you and that you can scale across as many videos as you want.
Your avatar is the face of your content. Your AI voice is the soul. Getting both right is what makes your HeyGen videos feel truly authentic.
