How to write text that makes TTS sound human: fillers, false starts and pacing

Natural-sounding voice agents depend primarily on writing replies as spoken conversation rather than polished text, because AssemblyAI-TTS-1 derives pacing, tone, pauses, and hesitations from wording and structure instead of SSML-style markup. The guidance recommends soft or mid-thought openings, short fragments, a maximum of one varied filler, false start, stutter, or trailing pause per reply, and brief first responses, while avoiding disfluencies in important numbers, names, compliance statements, or urgent interactions. Punctuation can refine delivery through emphasis, questions, short pauses, cutoffs, and selective capitalization, but bracketed stage directions are spoken aloud and should be removed. Numbers, dates, phone numbers, addresses, emails, and abbreviations should generally be written in conventional forms, with dashes used when digits or letters must be read individually. Developers are encouraged to embed these conversational rules in an LLM system prompt, prohibit Markdown, emoji, brackets, and lists, test phrasing across chosen voices, and stream text sentence by sentence so audio begins quickly and naturally.

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