Ode launches free AI voice service for poem recommendations

Ode Poetry has launched Ode, a free AI voice service that recommends poems in response to users’ feelings. William Sieghart created the service with Microsoft AI and Gravity Road.

Users speak with an AI voice companion based on Sieghart, founder of National Poetry Day and The Poetry Pharmacy, before receiving a poem selected from a curated library.

Ode is aimed at people seeking comfort, reflection or creativity through conversation rather than search. It draws on the therapeutic approach behind The Poetry Pharmacy, Sieghart’s long-running effort to match poems to particular moods and situations.

Users begin by describing how they feel in a short spoken exchange. The system then recommends a poem and delivers it through pre-recorded readings by actors and cultural figures including Stephen Fry, Harriet Walter, Indira Varma and Dominic West.

The project marks an unusual use of generative AI at a time when most consumer products have focused on productivity, customer service or entertainment. Here, the emphasis is on emotional support through literature, with the technology guiding users to existing creative work rather than generating new poems.

According to the companies involved, the service uses Microsoft AI voice and transcription models to recreate Sieghart’s speaking style and interpret users’ spoken responses. The poems are not synthetic output but existing works, delivered through human performances for the app.

The creators said they had secured permission to use the content and voices. That is likely to matter as technology groups face continued scrutiny over the use of creative material and likenesses in AI products.

Ode grew out of in-person poetry sessions Sieghart held at literary events around the UK. Those sessions later informed his Poetry Pharmacy anthologies, published by Penguin, which popularised the idea that poems can be prescribed for emotional states much like remedies.

Human readings

The emphasis on recorded human readings is central to the product’s design. While the conversational layer relies on AI, the poems are delivered in performers’ voices rather than machine-generated narration, a choice intended to preserve a sense of intimacy and authorship.

Gravity Road, the creative studio behind the build, said it designed the service to extend the reach of those personal poetry consultations to a broader audience. The agency is part of The Brandtech Group and works across advertising, social media and creative technology.

Microsoft AI’s involvement places the project within a growing category of cultural and wellbeing applications for large language and speech models. Technology companies have increasingly pointed to uses in education, health and the arts as they respond to criticism over job displacement, misinformation and copyright disputes.

For Ode Poetry, the launch also represents an effort to widen access to a format that has usually depended on live events, books or institutional partnerships. The social enterprise has worked with NHS trusts and mental health charities, using poetry in public and care settings as a source of respite.

“I’ve spent much of my adult life trying to get poetry out of the poetry corner, because I believe in its power to heal and inspire. This project offers the ability to scale a small idea on a global level, and I am hugely excited by the number of people whose lives might be touched by the simple magic of a poem,” said William Sieghart, creator of The Poetry Pharmacy and Ode at Ode Poetry.

His remarks point to the central commercial and cultural question behind the launch: whether users will accept AI not just as a tool for tasks, but as an intermediary for emotionally resonant experiences rooted in human art.

“Poetry is possibly the world’s oldest voice technology. Ode combines it with the very latest AI to reconnect people with the timeless power of real human voices. While much of the AI conversation currently focuses on what it might replace, Ode shows how it can protect and amplify what makes us human,” said Eaves.

The product also reflects a broader effort by developers to frame AI as assistive rather than autonomous. In this case, the model does not write or perform the poem itself; instead, it listens, interprets and selects from material assembled in advance.

That distinction may help the project avoid some of the backlash seen against AI-generated creative content. By positioning the technology as a conversational front end to a human-curated archive, the creators are making the case for AI as a route into literature rather than a substitute for it.

“We’re proud that Ode uses Microsoft’s AI models, not to replace human connection, but to extend it, making moments of reflection and self-care more accessible in everyday life,” said Back.

The service is available as a web app and centres on a simple proposition articulated elsewhere by Sieghart: “A thought which you had thought special and particular to you is set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead, and it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”