Short answer: pick a greeting above, change the names and hours to yours, choose a voice and press Generate; then download the MP3 and upload it to your phone system. Each example is under 200 characters, so it plays without an account. To download a greeting without the short spoken credit at the end, sign in first with a free account; it takes no card.
How to make a voicemail greeting
- Pick a greeting with the buttons above the tags: business, personal, after hours, out of office or Spanish.
- Put in your details. Your name or company, opening hours, a callback promise. Keep the
[pause]tags between sentences; they are not read out. - Pick a voice. All 28 voices can read it. Our voice pages suggest Altair for customer support and IVR and Sirius for business briefings (suggestions, not xAI descriptions).
- Press Generate and listen. Change a word and generate again until it sounds right.
- Press Download MP3 and upload the file where your voicemail greeting goes.
A business greeting with short breaks between sentences:
Hi, you have reached Maple Street Dental. [pause] We are with a patient right now. [pause] Please leave your name, number and a short message, and we will call you back today.
Download without the credit
Signed out, every MP3 ends with a short spoken credit. That is fine for trying voices, but not for a greeting callers will hear. Sign in with email or Google before you generate the final version and the downloaded file is only your greeting. A free email account shares the same 3 previews a day; a Google account raises the limit to 1,000 characters per clip.
Where to upload the MP3
The steps depend on your phone service, so check its help page; the pattern is the same almost everywhere:
- Business phone systems and VoIP (RingCentral, Zoom Phone, Grasshopper and similar): look for voicemail, greeting or auto attendant settings and upload an audio file. Most accept MP3; a few want WAV, which any audio converter makes from the MP3.
- Carrier voicemail on a mobile phone usually records the greeting through a call, not a file. Play the MP3 next to the phone while it records, in a quiet room.
Why use [pause]
In our two pre-recorded clips of the same greeting in the same voice, the gaps between sentences are about 0.4 seconds without tags and about 0.8 seconds with [pause], and the greeting gets one second longer. That small break makes a greeting sound less rushed. Use [long-pause] for a longer one, for example before "press 1 for…". To slow down the whole greeting, lower the speed under Settings.
Greetings in other languages
Every voice speaks all 20 supported languages, so the same voice can record an English and a Spanish greeting. Type the greeting in that language and leave Language on Auto-detect, or pick it under Settings. The Spanish button loads an example. For a bilingual greeting, generate each language as its own clip and join them, or keep both in one text under 200 characters.
Tips for a better greeting
- Say who they reached first. Callers want to know they dialled the right number.
- Give one clear instruction. Name, number, short message; anything more gets skipped.
- Say when you will call back, if you can promise it.
- Keep it under 20 seconds. About 50 words is plenty.
- Update it for holidays. The out of office example is a starting point.
The announcer voice generator does event and PA announcements, and the Grok text to speech homepage has the full tool with every tag.
Limits, price and privacy
Signed out, you get 3 previews a day of up to 200 characters, downloadable with a short spoken credit at the end; a free account removes the credit, and a Google account raises the limit to 1,000 characters per clip. The tag characters count toward the limit. Your text goes to xAI's model through our Cloudflare function to make the audio and is not stored.
If you build your own app, the same model costs $15 per million characters through xAI's API; see the pricing calculator.
Last updated: