Everything else in Brief happens through a screen. Voice is the exception, and it runs both ways: Brief reads your brief aloud, and you talk to Brief and it answers.
That second half is the part people miss. This is not dictation into a text box. It is a live conversation, with a microphone open, Brief speaking back, and a transcript running if you want to see it. You ask what is waiting on you, it tells you, you give it an instruction, and it acts on your approval the same as it would from the keyboard.
Reading aloud and talking belong together because one group of settings controls both. The voice you pick is the voice Brief reads your morning in and the voice it answers you in. Both live under Settings → Briefing & Actions, in the Audio group.
Turning it on
Read my brief aloud is the switch. As the card says, it "adds a Listen control to your brief and a link in your daily email."
It also opens the rest of the group. Turning it on reveals the voice Brief speaks in, the speed and delivery, how much of your brief gets read, and the standing instruction Brief follows in a spoken conversation. You can still start a voice conversation with the switch off, but it opens cold with nothing read to you, and none of the settings below are there to tune. Turning it on is what opens both halves properly.
One mechanical thing before you start changing things. The switch itself saves the moment you flip it. Everything below it waits for Save at the bottom of the group, so choose your voice, hear it, and then save before you leave the page.
Choosing how Brief sounds
Voice lists what is available, each entry naming the voice and then its gender, accent and style, so two similar names are distinguishable before you commit to one.
Use Preview rather than guessing, and Stop to end the sample. A voice that reads well for ten seconds is not always the one you want for ten minutes a day, so try two or three.
This choice carries into conversations as well as the read-aloud. Picking a voice is picking how Brief sounds to you everywhere it speaks.
Voices occasionally retire. A saved voice that leaves the catalogue shows as "Your saved voice (no longer available)" and Brief falls back to a default, so you know to choose again instead of wondering why this morning sounded different.
Speed runs from 0.8x to 1.2x in five steps. Most people settle slightly above normal once a voice is familiar, for the same reason podcast listeners drift upward: comprehension holds and the brief ends sooner. This carries into conversations as well, so the speed that suits your morning is also the speed Brief answers you at.
Delivery is Calm, Balanced or Energetic, which the hint describes as "how the voice carries." It changes the reading, not the words.
Telling Brief how to talk to you
How Brief should speak is a free-text box, and its hint is precise about scope: it "applies to voice conversations." This is not how Brief reads your brief. It is the standing instruction Brief follows when it is talking with you.
The placeholder shows the kind of thing to write: "Get to the point. Use my first name." Short, direct instruction about how to address you and how much preamble to tolerate. Brief the new assistant on their first morning and you have written it. The box holds 500 characters, which is more room than a good instruction needs.
It is worth spending a minute on, because you cannot skip ahead in speech. When Brief writes you an answer, your eye jumps over the warm-up and lands on the part you wanted. When Brief says it, you hear every word in order. A sentence of throat-clearing you would never notice on screen costs you real seconds out loud, every single time.
Talking to Brief
Open the chat and look at the message box. When it is empty, a microphone sits at the end of it, labelled Start voice. Press it and the microphone opens, Brief listens, and it answers out loud. Type anything and the microphone gives way to Send, so clear the box if you have lost it.
While a conversation is running you can Mute microphone when you need a moment without ending the session, and Show transcript to read along or check what Brief heard. Stop voice, or Esc, ends it.
Two limits are worth knowing before you meet them. Voice needs a live conversation, so starting it from a past chat is refused with "Voice isn't available in a past chat. Start a new one to talk." And you cannot start it mid-answer: finish the current reply first. Sessions also carry a duration and turn ceiling, so a long conversation ends on its own rather than running indefinitely.
Hearing your brief
Two places, covering different moments.
In the app, a Listen control appears on your brief. Brief synthesizes the audio when you ask rather than keeping a recording ready, so expect a few seconds before a full brief starts playing.
Next to it is Talk about it, and this is the shortest path between the two halves of voice. It drops you into a conversation about the same day you were just listening to. Hear something that needs an answer, press one button, start asking.
In your daily email, a Listen to this brief link sits alongside the written one. This is the one most people end up using, because it reaches you in the message you were going to open anyway. The link lands you on that day in the app with the audio already being prepared, so there is nothing to find and nothing to set up. Some browsers refuse to start audio on their own, in which case you will arrive at a ready Play rather than a brief already running.
Spoken brief length decides how much gets read: Brief, Standard or Detailed. Set it deliberately, because spoken length is not written length. A brief you skim in two minutes takes considerably longer to hear, and there is no skimming audio. Start on Brief for a short commute and move up only if you find yourself opening the app afterwards to fill in gaps.
What this is actually for
Voice is not a convenience layer over the same work. It opens hours that were previously closed to Brief entirely.
The commute, the walk, the kitchen, the gym. Your eyes and hands are busy and a screen is not an option, which rules the written brief out completely and rules the spoken one in.
Before the day starts. A brief heard while you are getting ready lands before the first message does. That is the difference between walking into the day informed and catching up on it at ten.
Between things. The three minutes after a meeting, walking to the next one, is enough to ask what is waiting on you and tell Brief what you just agreed to. Typing that into a phone is not realistic. Saying it is.
When you want to think out loud. Talking is faster than typing and less considered, which is sometimes exactly right. Working out what to do about a thread is easier spoken than composed.
One thing voice will not fix. If you have started skimming the written brief for anything urgent and then closing it, switching to audio makes that worse rather than better, because you cannot skim a recording. That is a brief that needs shortening: see Tuning your daily brief.
Audio is one group on a screen that holds several. Briefing and action settings covers the rest, and Set up your communications connectors covers the delivery time and days that decide when any of this reaches you.