A toast to AI wedding speeches
Entrepreneur and author Jen Glantz on creating 100+ wedding AI tools
Chief Word Officer is a hub for tips and trends on writing with AI, run by humans. If you’ve been forwarded this email, subscribe here.
FT columnist Pilita Clark has protested that the deluge of AI coverage has failed to show “how [the tech] is being used and what it will end up doing.” This is precisely how this newsletter aims to set itself apart: by showing how AI is changing our everyday. Not as much as Big Tech’s masters want us to believe, but still, in important ways.
Take wedding speeches. At least one person at every ceremony I (Eleanor) have recently attended admits to using ChatGPT. To draft one of the most personal addresses they will ever deliver in their lives. (Cue my face as this emoji: 😑)
To better understand this phenomenon, I reached out to Jen Glantz. Most famous for building a business as a professional bridesmaid, Jen has also helped people write wedding speeches for years. She now has a suite of AI tools, built on Claude and based on her insights, that will craft you a best man speech, vows…even a love letter.
Our conversation, edited for brevity and clarity, is below.
🔑 Key takeaways from my conversation with Jen
🎨 The best wedding speeches have personality. Jen’s AI tools bring out personality by extracting details from users through a series of dynamic questions to avoid the generic clichés that plague typical LLM-generated speeches.
🧑🧑🧒🧒 The whole family is getting in on AI: Often, one member of the bridal party will use the tool, and the rest of the party will pick it up. The second most popular category is parent of the bride/groom speeches. Tech is infectious.
🎤 Wedding speeches of the future might be more impromptu than rehearsed: As more people reject older wedding traditions and ChatGPT drivel, wedding speeches might become more spontaneous. Get ready to be handed a mic without warning.
EW: Hello! Tell me about your history with wedding speeches.
JG: [Speech writing] was a huge part of my business for many, many years. But writing a speech would take about five to six hours. I'd have to talk to the person, get to know them, get to know their voice. The price point was around $400, so it was quite expensive as well. I was doing between five and 15 a month, depending on the season.
Then I got pregnant. Hours after giving birth to my daughter, I was like, “Oh my God, I have to finish a speech tomorrow.” I remember pulling out my laptop. I was like, “This is just not sustainable.”
So I teamed up with a developer to build all of these different AI speech and vow writing tools. We took the hundreds of speeches that I've written over the past decade and trained the model to have personality and human touch. In addition to that, it mimics the process that I had: you and I getting on the phone, getting to know you, asking you questions. ChatGPT doesn't do that. It just says, “Hey, what can I help you with?”
EW: That is the problem with AI. It expects you to know what questions to ask, when having information extracted from you is sometimes more valuable.
JG: When you use AI, if you don't do that, it's just going to spit out something generic and sound like everything else. It's also going to probably fill in the gaps of your speech with cliché things.
We go through a process [with the AI tools] that could take anywhere between five and 20 minutes, depending on how detailed you want to get. It asks about, let's say, “What's a childhood memory?” You share the childhood memory, and then it will ask you another follow-up question about that specific memory.
EW: What has the feedback been like?
JG: The demand has been crazy because it’s also a less expensive price point. Not everyone can afford $400, and I was pretty inexpensive. Now it costs $35, so it's a lot more attainable. Plus, you get unlimited edits.
We also have a middle ground, the human touch package, where you can input all your data into AI, and then I will write the speech if you want the next level. That’s $97.
The coolest thing that I've seen is that a bride will use it for her vows, and then the groom will use it, and then they'll have their maid of honor and best man use it, and then the father of the groom…whole families are using it. Everyone has the emotions inside of them, but not everyone can get them out the way that they want.
EW: What makes a good wedding speech?
JG: Personality, which can't be faked. You can't teach or impersonate personality. It has to be genuine. When that comes through in a speech, it’s so fun. People who know the person are like, “Oh my God, that is so Jen,” and there's such love around that.
You need to have specific details: two or three great stories anchored in your speech. But these stories shouldn't drag on, and they shouldn't have inside jokes.
I think keeping it under four minutes, because after four minutes, nobody can really handle it. Keep it short and sweet.
EW: Have you been satisfied with the personality aspect of the AI tool you created?
JG: The personality side is the strongest when people give the most details. People who use the tool and give three word or a sentence answer will get a really good speech. It's going to have personality, but it might not have extra personality. But if they take the time to say, “I'm going to tell you a childhood story” and give a lot of detail, the tool can see how they wrote it and how their voice sounded when they were writing it.
We also have a speech-to-text option. So we can hear your personality that way. Personality comes out in your word choice, your sentence structure.
EW: I have been to a lot of ceremonies where people admit to having used ChatGPT for their speech as if it’s embarrassing or shameful. Do you see those emotions in the people using your tools?
JG: I think it's so cringe to say you use ChatGPT. It bothers me because it makes me feel like you put no effort into it. When I hear people say that, or when I go on LinkedIn, and I can tell it's from ChatGPT, I'm like, “I miss you.” I miss the person.
But people don't keep [the fact that they used the AI wedding speech writing tool] as much of a secret as you think. I think because the process is so chatty, it doesn't feel like you're just using Claude or ChatGPT and writing something generic.
If you go through all these speeches [created with my tools], none of them look and sound the same, which I think is important.
EW: In creating the tool, you had to go through a process where you picked apart the individual building blocks of a good speech, something you understand intuitively. When you analyzed that, did something surprise you?
JG: A lot of it went back to structure. I'm not a person who feels like there has to be one set structure, but I do think there needs to be structure and a through line to a speech.
People don't realize that these speeches are not just for the couple; they're for the audience. It has to make sense in people's brains. People need to hear a story structure [in the speech].
EW: What’s next for this as a business and for wedding speeches in general?
JG: Our second most popular category is parent speeches: parents of the bride, the groom. They're using this like crazy, and a lot of them feel more comfortable picking up the phone and voicing it in.
When we saw this was so popular, we used this model to build 100 other wedding AI tools, from honeymoon planning to bachelorette party planning. A lot of the people who are coming to us for speeches want more.
In terms of speeches, wedding speeches are going to change over the next couple of years. It's hard to say how, but I do think there might be less like tradition to it and more performance aspects that break away from the traditional mold.
EW: Do you think those changes might reflect the impact of digital technology on society? A desire to have something authentic?
JG: I think it's society as a whole thinking, “How do I break away from a mold that I never fit in and never understood?”
The best thing that I’ve seen at a wedding is speeches — and this is dangerous, but it’s so beautiful — is something that often happens after funerals. But there are parallels to weddings and funerals; they are the only times in your life when everyone's in the same room that you love.
At some point in the wedding, during the ceremony or later on, they'll pass the mic around to whoever wants to speak. These are some of the most authentic things you will ever hear, because no one's bringing a paper. Everyone's getting up and sharing a memory or a moment. There is nothing as powerful and as moving as an impromptu speech like that.
I think we're going to move more toward that in the future, because eventually we're going to get sick of everyone using ChatGPT. You're going to start to miss the authenticity of people and crave it. As a writer, I'm looking forward to that next chapter.
EW: There is also the delivery aspect to speeches. Do you work on that?
JG: Yes, that is a huge part because a lot of people are not great writers, but a lot more people are not great public speakers.
If you use the tool, you get access to a digital course on public speaking that I give. We have a product where you can work with me, and we do three sessions to practice the speech. One skill that AI can't replace is public speaking.
EW: I am a professional writer, and I always say that an article is different from a press release, is different from an essay. Everything requires a different muscle.
JG: For sure. The other thing you don't think about is the pressure. Even if you are a professional writer, the pressure of having to write this once-in-a-lifetime thing kills people. I have people all the time who are like, “Don’t laugh at me. I’m a writer, but I can’t do this.”
EW: It seems using AI is about both embracing what the tool can do to bring out emotions, but also trying to put your own self into it.
JG: For sure. If you're scared of using AI, my advice to you is, don't take the first version as final, use it as a draft, and maybe it'll spark ideas for you.
Other voices, other rooms
🎸 I (Kenn) am intrigued that the GenAI age may unleash impromptu speeches—a backlash against the automated in favor of the authentic. A similar shift happened in pop culture in the 1990s; after the era of synthesizer-rich New Wave bands (ie, mouthing “Hungry Like the Wolf” on TV), there was grunge and the “unplugged” movement (ie, Cobain on acoustic guitar). Today, PhD candidates submit their dissertation and then do a viva voce (literally “live voice”) defense. I suspect education assessment will become more conversational, like the wedding speech.
🚪Some have proposed even more radical solutions to AI use in education, such as historian Niall Ferguson’s “cloister.” It’s a “quarantine space in which traditional methods of learning can be maintained and all devices excluded” with “assessment via oral and written examinations under strict invigilated conditions.” Of course, anyone who trots out terms “invigilated“ doesn’t need GenAI… But the rest of us might. And banning something makes it more tempting. So however much I respect the idea, I revolt against it. People need to learn how to use the technology, not just muse unplugged. Surely there’s room for both.
🤖 No one knows if GenAI will lead to a jobocalypse. But a wise predection comes from Arvind Narayanan, a computer scientist at Princeton, in his recent talks and paper “AI as Normal Technology”: people will supervise tha technology. In his words:
Before the Industrial Revolution, most jobs involved manual labor. Over time […] ways of operating, controlling, and monitoring physical machines were invented. And what humans do in factories today is a combination of ‘control’ (monitoring automated assembly lines, programming robotic systems, managing quality control checkpoints, and coordinating responses to equipment malfunctions)...
In other words, we’re all Chief Word Officers now.
☕️ Thank you for reading!
We played around with Jen’s tools and were very pleasantly surprised. Have you used AI to write a speech recently? Share it with us.
If you were forwarded this email, subscribe below.
Kenn couldn’t resist putting two typos into the text. Last week’s missive was entirely human-written, save for the part Kenn disclosed as done by AI (GPT-4.5).
Thank you so much for featuring me! I loved chatting with you about this!