I’ve thought long and hard about this. I believe success of content using AI voice overs could be impacted heavily by trust, more so than quality, with the introduction of the EU AI Act.
Having been around the multimedia localisation and accessibility industry for nearing eight years, my role is to stay on top of the latest developments, talk to industry experts, liaise with vendors, like voice over artists, and everyone in-between.
From those conversations and my analysis, I’m quite confident about my position.
Why? To be honest, it’s not so much about the quality of the voice overs themselves. With the developments in technology, some AI voice overs are good. Very good, in fact.
This can depend on the language, however. Generally speaking, English and Spanish tend to be high-level because these languages access to larger training datasets, more voice talent recordings and greater commercial investment.
In other languages with less access to training datasets and recordings, they won’t be as good.
In these high-level languages now more often than not that you can’t really tell the difference—scary really! While they may lack emotion and variety in some cases, they can also be pretty realistic and hard to distinguish from a human voice at times.
That being said, if there is a twinge of AI noticed, I think that can impact viewer trust. That could be the trust of the brand, product or the advert itself.
A research study by the Nuremberg Institute for Market Decisions (NIM) found that 21% of respondents trust AI companies and their promises, and only 20% trust AI itself.
But that’s not my main point. My main focus of the piece surrounds the EU AI Act and the impact of that. This legal framework — a world first for generative AI — partly involves the use on AI in your media content.
The EU AI Act: in more detail
This framework impacts both businesses based in the EU and businesses outside the EU (in places like the U.S.), if they place AI systems on the EU market, sell AI services to EU customers, or if their AI system’s output is used within the EU.
The main takeaway from the Act is that in a multimedia services setting, content must be clearly labelled as AI-generated, such as AI voiceovers.
For public facing content such as advertisements, marketing videos and films, the EU AI Act requires that AI‑generated or AI‑manipulated audio, images and video content is clearly disclosed where it could otherwise mislead audiences.
For example, if you created an advert for your film with an AI voiceover for the narrator, you may need to label it. This is part of transparency obligations.
If it’s not obvious from the context that the voice is synthetic and a reasonable person could think it is a real human voice, then disclosure is required.
Simply put, that can look like labelling an AI voiceover (synthetic audio) as AI-generated with text on the screen. Or labelling an AI dub too.
A negative trust signal
From my perspective, this disclosure is also going to mainly impact trust and be seen as a negative trust signal.
Even if it sounds like a human voice, if you use an AI voice for your advert, for example, and it’s not obvious, you will need to label it. Then, the mere association of being AI-generated will, in my opinion, cause some audiences to have less trust in the product and not feel as aligned or close with it.
While I can’t speak for every customer, it will be a chunk of the audience. There’s a reason that micro-influencer marketing is so successful. People like to interact with genuine people and content.
And as I touched on earlier, the research that shows only one in five people trust AI itself, means that 80% of people don’t fully trust it.
Is that an association you want your brand to have? Only you can decide that.
The future
Could that trust level with AI change over time?
It could.
If AI voice overs become the norm and unnoticeable from humans, audiences could get used to labelling that its AI and trust may not be impacted.
That all being said, I feel we could still be a few years away if that would be the case. So, for now, I believe trust will be impacted for voice overs specifically.
It’s important to note I’m not anti-AI at all. We provide multimedia AI services such as live captions, subtitles, voice over, dubbing, and more. It certainly serves a purpose.
However, I think there is a time and a place for AI. If your brand wants to keep costs low and scale content, then it is perfect for that. If trust, guaranteed accuracy, and professionalism are more of a priority, then humans are the best fit.
We will always be transparent with AI usage in our workflows. Usually, we will give the client their options and provide our usual honest advice on which we recommend in that situation.
Transparency with audiences and being a responsible provider are all things that we are aligned with, and we encourage the full enforcement of the Act from August 2026.
Of course, only time will tell, but I maintain that AI voice overs could be heavily impacted by labelling. Therefore, we may see more businesses leaning on human voices instead.
