Adding professional audio narration to your course is a great way to boost learner engagement and improve accessibility. Mindsmith allows you to generate lifelike AI voiceovers or upload your own custom audio files.

You can instantly narrate an entire lesson, or fine-tune the audio for specific tiles to create the perfect learning experience.

If your lesson is fully drafted, you can generate narration for the entire course in just a few clicks. This is the fastest way to add audio to your lesson.

To narrate your entire lesson:

A loading screen will appear while your audio generates. For larger lessons, this may take a few minutes to complete.

Tip: OpenAI voices are multilingual and can speak most languages naturally. If you are narrating a translated lesson, selecting an OpenAI voice will ensure the best pronunciation.

Note: ElevenLabs voices are available on Business and above. They offer a wider selection of accents and languages.

You can customize how narration behaves for specific layouts or individual tiles. This is helpful if you want to skip audio for certain sections or rewrite the spoken script without changing the on-screen text.

To adjust these settings, click on a layout and open the Narration context menu. From here, you can choose between three main modes:

Tiles mode narrates each tile in the layout individually using its visible text content. This is the standard mode for most layouts.

For Experience (branching scenario) tiles, the tab label changes to All Nodes, and narration is generated across all nodes in the scenario.

Use Manual mode when you want the spoken audio to be different from the text shown on the screen. This is perfect for adding extra context or conversational asides.

To generate manual narration:

Tip: If you make a mistake while editing the manual script, click the Sync Text button. This will revert the text box back to match the visible text on your tile. Keep in mind that a single tile cannot exceed 4096 characters of narration.

If you have visual layouts, title screens, or activities that do not require audio, select the None tab. This disables narration entirely for the selected layout or tile.

Interactive Narration plays audio in sync with how learners interact with a tile — rather than narrating the entire tile at once, each individual item gets its own clip that plays when the learner reaches it. For example, each flashcard card narrates as it flips, each process step narrates as it advances, and each accordion panel narrates when opened.

Interactive Narration is a beta feature currently rolling out to users.

If you prefer to use your own voice or have pre-recorded audio from a professional voiceover artist, you can easily upload your own files.

To upload custom narration:

Mindsmith supports standard audio formats, including MP3, WAV, M4A, and OGG. Once uploaded, you can click Remove at any time to delete the custom file and return to AI-generated voices.

When learners take your course, they have full control over how they consume the narration. A sleek audio player appears at the bottom of the content area for narrated tiles.