What ChatGPT does well
ChatGPT is a general purpose AI assistant, and writing is one of the things it is good at. For a wedding speech it is genuinely useful for these jobs.
- Turning rough notes into a structured first draft: opening, stories, tribute, toast.
- Offering several versions of a line so you can pick the one that sounds like you.
- Shortening a draft that runs long, or making a stiff paragraph more conversational.
- Suggesting a toast or a closing line when you are stuck.
- Giving feedback on a draft you wrote yourself, such as where it drags or which joke might not land.
- Helping with a speech in another language, or a few lines for relatives who do not speak English.
A prompt that works
The quality of the draft depends almost entirely on what you put in. A one-line request such as "write a best man speech for my friend Dave" gets you a speech that could be about anyone. Give it the material instead. Here is a prompt you can adapt; replace everything in square brackets.
I am the [best man] at [Conor and Aisling]'s wedding in [Galway]. Write a wedding speech of about [700] words that I will read aloud. The guests are [mostly family, including grandparents], so keep it warm and clean. The tone should be [funny first, then sincere at the end].
How I know [Conor]: [we shared a flat in college for three years].
The story I always tell: [the night he locked himself out and climbed in the wrong window, and the neighbours' reaction].
What I admire about him: [he turns up for people; he drove me to the airport at 4am twice].
About [Aisling]: [they met at a friend's barbecue; she beat him at a quiz and he has not stopped talking about it].
Use only the facts I have given you. Do not invent stories, names or details. Write in plain, spoken Irish English, avoid clichés, and end with a toast to the couple.
The last paragraph matters most. Asking it to use only your facts, in your kind of English, cuts out a lot of the generic filler.
Follow-up requests worth trying
- "Rewrite the opening so it sounds like someone talking, not writing."
- "Cut this to 550 words without losing the window story."
- "Give me five other ways to say the line about the quiz."
- "Which lines might upset an older relative? Explain why."
- "Mark every fact in the speech that I did not give you."
- "Split the speech into cue cards of two or three sentences each."
Where it falls short
None of these are faults so much as the limits of a general tool used for a very personal job.
- It only knows what you tell it. It has never met the couple, so a thin brief produces a thin speech.
- It can fill gaps with plausible detail. If your notes are vague, a draft may add a hobby, a place or a quote that is not true. Check every fact before you say it in front of the people it is about.
- First drafts lean on familiar wedding phrases. Asking it to avoid clichés helps, but you will still need to rewrite lines in your own words.
- Word counts are approximate. A draft asked for 700 words may come back noticeably longer or shorter, so count it yourself and time it aloud.
- It cannot judge your room. It does not know that the bride's grandmother is hard of hearing, or that a particular uncle is touchy about money.
- Collecting stories from friends is up to you. You gather them, decide which to use and paste them in.
- It does not coordinate speakers. If the groom and the best man both ask a chatbot for help, nothing tells them they are planning the same story.
Privacy: check your settings first
A wedding speech is full of other people's names and stories. Before you paste them into any AI tool, check how it handles what you type. ChatGPT has data controls in its settings, including whether your conversations may be used to improve its models. Settings and policies change, so look at the current ones rather than relying on what someone told you, and leave out anything you would not want stored.
When ChatGPT is all you need
If you already have your stories, you are comfortable editing, and you are the only speaker you need to worry about, ChatGPT may be all the help you need. Plenty of good speeches start that way. The work that makes a speech land is the same whichever tool you use: real memories, ruthless cutting, and reading it aloud until it sounds like you.
Where a dedicated speech writer like Toast fits
Toast is not built on ChatGPT. It is a wedding speech writer made for this one job, and it does some of the work you would otherwise do by hand.
- It asks the questions for you: how you know the couple, the story you always tell, what you love about them, and what you wish for them.
- You choose your role, the tone, who will be listening, the speech language and a target of 3, 5 or 7 minutes before it writes.
- Story Harvest lets friends and family send their stories or voice notes by link, without an account, and you choose which ones reach your drafts.
- On the draft it can flag a line that might not suit the room, say why, and offer a softer version.
- The rehearse page has a timer and cue card view, and you can download a speech PDF, printable cue cards, a keepsake PDF or a Word file.
- The Wedding party room puts up to six speakers in one running order and checks privately that no two of them tell the same story.
A speech costs €29 one time, with no subscription. Toast does not use your speeches or stories to train AI models. The AI services it uses are listed in its privacy policy.