Lebanese Arabic Voice Over with AI: Tone, Spelling and Ready-to-Use Scripts

01What makes a Lebanese voiceover sound Lebanese

Lebanese is a branch of Levantine Arabic, but an Arabic speaker can usually place a Lebanese ad within a sentence. The delivery is light and playful, the lines are short, and the speaker talks to you like an old friend. That is why brands lean on it for beauty, fashion, restaurants, nightlife, travel and lifestyle apps: anything that wants to feel close rather than formal.

The second giveaway is language mixing. Hi, kifak, ça va? is not a joke about Lebanese people; it is how a lot of urban Lebanese speak. Words like merci, bonjour, sale and delivery slide into Arabic sentences without anyone noticing. In a voiceover, the mixing has to be a choice that fits your audience, not an accident.

• Qaf becomes a glottal stop: in everyday speech قلبي (my heart) is said albi and قدّيش (how much) is addeish. It is the single clearest Lebanese marker.
• Signature words: هلّق (now), بدّي (I want), كتير (very), منيح (good), شو (what), هيدا and هيدي (this), رح (will).
• A softened word ending: many words ending in ة are said with a light e sound, so مدرسة (school) comes out close to madrase.
• The progressive عم: عم نحضّرلك شي حلو means we're preparing something nice for you right now.

This guide is part of our wider series on Arabic dialects for voiceover. If you have not settled on a dialect yet, start with the main guide:

02How to make a Lebanese Arabic voice over in Vocla, step by step

The voice reads what you write. Feed a Lebanese voice a Modern Standard Arabic script and you get a formal text in a Lebanese accent, which sounds odd to any Lebanese listener. Write it in Lebanese first and let the tools do the rest.

1. 1Write the script in Lebanese: use the words your audience actually says, in short lines with room to breathe. Read it out loud before you generate anything.
2. 2Open Text to speech: paste the script, up to 10,000 characters per generation.
3. 3Pick Lebanese in the dialect picker: it forces the voice into a native Lebanese accent instead of a generic one, which is what makes هلّق sound like Beirut.
4. 4Choose a voice in the Voice library: filter by dialect, gender and style, and audition more than one Lebanese voice on the same line.
5. 5Lock the pronunciation: add brand and place names to the pronunciation dictionary once, and add tashkeel (Arabic diacritics) to ambiguous words. Diacritics are not counted against your credits.
6. 6Tune and export: adjust speed, expressiveness and clarity with simple sliders, then download MP3, or WAV on paid plans.

For a social video, one more step: in the Video studio you write the same script, pick the same Lebanese voice, and get generated scenes with Arabic captions burned in. If you want to hear the voices first, the Levantine voices page plays Jordanian and Lebanese samples side by side:

03Spelling Lebanese so text to speech reads it right

Colloquial Arabic has no official spelling, and every copywriter writes it a little differently. Human readers cope; a voice sometimes stumbles. These rules come from writing Lebanese scripts for TTS:

• Qaf or hamza: write words shared with MSA with ق, such as قلبي and قديش, and listen to the preview. If a qaf comes out too heavy in an everyday word, spell it the way it is said: أديش instead of قديش.
• French and English in Latin letters: write merci, sale and delivery as they are, not ميرسي or سيل. A voice reads a foreign word more cleanly in its own script.
• Numbers as words: خصم عشرين بالمية (twenty percent off) reads more naturally than 20%, and you control how it is said.
• Shadda where it matters: بدّي and هلّق with a shadda (the doubling mark) get the rhythm right, and diacritics cost no credits.
• Punctuation for breath: a comma is a short pause, a full stop a longer one. Lebanese is fast, but an ad still needs air.

Here is one line in Modern Standard Arabic and in Lebanese. Same meaning: want fresh skin before summer? Try our new range now, with free delivery.

The Lebanese version does more than swap words. It switches to the feminine جرّبي because the audience is women, and it borrows two English words the audience really uses. That is the gap between a translated script and one written for the place. If your scripts mix Arabic and English a lot, we have a full guide on how voices handle it:

04Lebanese scripts you can copy and test

Four short scripts for the most common jobs, each roughly 15 to 30 seconds. Paste them into Text to speech as they are, then swap in your own names and numbers.

Check the length before you write. A 30-second ad fits roughly 60 to 75 words at a comfortable pace, and natural Lebanese delivery runs a little faster than MSA, so resist the urge to cram.

05Lebanese, Jordanian or Modern Standard Arabic?

Vocla's Levantine voices are Jordanian and Lebanese, and they are not interchangeable. Jordanian voices sound grounded and clear, a good fit for banks, services and learning content. Lebanese voices are lighter and more playful, made for lifestyle and entertainment. The table covers the differences that show up in most scripts:

The rule of thumb: pick the dialect of the place where the audio will be heard, not where the company is based. A Beirut restaurant ad should be Lebanese, a campaign for Amman should be Jordanian, and an explainer for viewers across many Arab countries may work better in MSA. Jordanian has its own guide with ready scripts:

Still unsure? The dialect finder suggests a dialect from your target country, audience and use case, and links to matching voices:

06Cost, the right plan, and what to check before you publish

Every dialect costs the same on Vocla, so Lebanese is no more expensive than MSA. Usage is billed by characters: Vox Prime uses 1,200 credits per 1,000 characters, and 1,000 characters is roughly one spoken minute. A 30-second ad of about 500 characters comes to around 600 credits.

Prices display in your local currency where available and are charged in USD. If the ad runs for a brand or a client, the Free plan is not enough because it carries no commercial rights; Starter is the starting point. Starter's monthly credits cover about eight 30-second ads on Vox Prime, or more if you draft on a lighter model such as Vox Edge and only render the final take on the top model. And because a revision means regenerating the line that changed, a client asking to swap one word or one price does not mean booking a new session.

• Get a Lebanese listener: before publishing, play the ad to someone from your target audience. A local ear catches an off word instantly.
• The choice is limited to the library: there are fewer Lebanese voices than Saudi or Egyptian ones, so audition what is available before promising a client a specific tone.
• Cloning only with consent: if you need a specific person's voice, cloning is available on paid plans for your own voice or someone who has agreed in writing.