When you paste a prompt into AI and what comes back reads fine but does not sound like you, it is because the tool has nothing of yours to work from, so it writes in the average voice of everything it has ever read. A voice file is how you fix that, one short page that tells the tool how you write, and it does more for how your writing sounds than any prompt you could buy.
When you sit down to make one and read the question ‘how do I sound,’ it is easy to freeze, because describing your own voice from a blank page is harder than it sounds. So instead of describing it, you use the writing you have already done.
Start from writing that already sounds like you
Find three to five pieces of your own writing from before you used AI, like:
- a client email you were happy with
- a caption that sounded like you
- a paragraph from an old newsletter
- a note you sent a friend
They only need to be yours, not the overpolished version you fussed over for an hour.
Let AI describe your voice back to you
Paste those samples into your tool and ask it to describe how you write, looking at:
- how you open and close
- the length of your sentences
- the words and phrases you reach for again and again
- where you use humor
- your overall rhythm
When you read what it gives you, you will recognize yourself far faster than you could have described yourself from scratch. Then keep the lines that ring true, cut the ones that do not, and you have the first half of your voice file.
Build your never-list, the half that does the most work
The second half is the list of words and phrases you would never use, and it is what keeps your writing from becoming generic over time. The AI patterns you have started to notice go straight in it:
- the empty warm-up openers
- the lines that announce a big reveal before they say anything
- the phrases that always arrive in a neat group of three
Add the plain words that are simply not yours, too. This list does the heavy lifting, because it tells the tool exactly which borrowed phrases to stay away from.
Save it as a file you can reuse anywhere
Keep your voice file as a markdown file, which is just a plain text file whose name ends in .md, because every AI tool reads it cleanly and you can paste it into any of them.
- On a Mac: open TextEdit, choose Format and then Make Plain Text, paste your voice file in, and save it with the name voice-file.md.
- On Windows: open Notepad, paste it in, choose Save As, and type voice-file.md as the name.
- If you want to make sure it’s okay, you can also ask any AI tool to turn your list into an .md file
From now on that one file lives on your computer, not inside a single tool, and you can reuse it everywhere.
Put it to work, then keep teaching it
Paste your voice file in at the start of any AI session, before you ask it for anything, and the first drafts will already come back closer to you. When the tool slips into a phrase you do not like, do not just fix it and move on, add it to your never-list or tell the tool what you would have said instead, so the next draft starts closer than the last.
Where this goes next
The voice file is where to start because it gives you the biggest shift for the least effort, and it is also the first piece of a larger setup. Once you have it, you can add the rest of what AI needs to sound like you and your business:
- what you do and who you serve
- your offers
- the words your clients use
- the rules the tool must never break
Together those become one brand file you reuse everywhere. Further along, you can hand that file to a tool that runs on it, like a Custom GPT or a fuller setup that drafts and runs tasks in your voice, and each of those is worth its own walk-through. For this week, writing the one page on how you sound is enough.
If you want a second set of eyes on your brand before you build the file, you can book a free Strategy Call, and we will look at where AI belongs for you first. You can also read more about where AI fits in your business on the strategy page.
