They will notice the LinkedIn voice.
A room of people who sat next to this person for years can tell the difference between "a true asset to the team" and the thing they actually did every single Tuesday. One of those gets a laugh of recognition. The other gets a polite silence.
"A true asset to the team" is not a sentence a colleague would say.
Type "retirement speech" into any free chatbot and a paragraph appears within seconds — dedication, wished-well, exciting new chapter, done. It is competent, it scans, and it is built entirely out of phrases every retirement speech has always used, because that average is exactly what a general-purpose model produces when nobody has told it a single true thing about the person.
The room notices the gap immediately. Colleagues who sat next to someone for years, sometimes decades, know their actual habits and the running joke that has been going for a decade. A speech assembled from stock praise reads like it was written by someone who never really worked alongside them — in the one room guaranteed to spot that instantly.
This job runs the other way. Nothing gets invented to fill a thin brief, and nothing plausible-sounding stands in for a fact you never supplied. Every sentence has to be traceable back to an answer you actually typed — a year, a project, a colleague's name — and where one is missing, the draft stops and flags it rather than making something up.
What it builds from your answers.
Nine short questions: who is retiring and who you are to them, how long they worked there and the shape of their roles, what they were genuinely like day to day, two or three real stories, what comes next for them, who is in the room, tone, length, and whether a gift is being handed over. Back comes a speech, a shorter cut of it, cue cards and delivery notes.
Here is a habit that is almost a story by itself, and what the tool does with it.
She says the printer responds to respect. Whenever it jams everyone else gives up and calls IT, she just talks to it for a minute and it works again. Nobody has ever seen her actually fix anything mechanical about it.
There is a printer on the third floor that has outlived two office moves and, as far as anyone can tell, several attempts by IT to replace it. [ADD FACT: her name] says it responds to respect. Nobody has ever seen her open the panel, adjust a tray, or do anything you could call a repair. She just talks to it for a minute, and it starts working again.
We are choosing not to investigate that further. Some things about [ADD FACT: her name] are simply true, the way the tide is true, and you learn to work around them rather than ask questions.
Look at what was left alone. No date was invented for when the printer story started, no brand name was guessed at, and the office legend was not flattened into a fake mechanical explanation. The particular, slightly ridiculous true thing survived intact, with a single gap flagged for a thirty-second fix. Nothing was added about her age or her length of service beyond what the answer actually said.
Getting from answers to a finished speech.
- Answer the questions. The stories field carries the most weight. Two or three specific moments — the save everyone still mentions, the mistake that can finally be told now they are leaving — outweigh a beautifully written page of vague praise, which is why that field has a minimum length.
- Top up once and the speech is generated. That funds your balance. This job is about 28p — never more than 40p and only ever charges what the finished draft actually cost, leaving the remainder for a different job later. Asking for a different tone or swapping out a story counts as a fresh run, so it draws on the balance again too.
- Four things land in your account. The full speech, a shortened cut for a room running out of patience, cue cards in order, and notes on pacing and where to look up.
Nothing is charged for a run that fails to produce a result.
Who this suits.
Worth it if
- You already have the material and just cannot make it hang together as a speech.
- You are a colleague rather than their manager, and every example online assumes you are delivering a formal leaving report.
- Something in the background needs delicate handling — a restructure, a departure you would rather not editorialise on — and you want it navigated quietly.
- You have one good story and three minutes on the clock, and that is genuinely all you have written down.
- A gift is being handed over and you want the speech to build towards it rather than fizzle out beforehand.
Not worth it if
- You did not really know them. No tool can manufacture closeness, and colleagues can always spot a speech written about a near-stranger.
- You are after a joke about their age, their pension, or how many years they had left. That will not get written, no matter how normal it feels at most send-offs.
- You want something you can read cold off a screen at the lectern. It is built to be spoken, but you still have to rehearse it at least once.
- You want it polished like an internal citation. The aim is a colleague's voice, deliberately a little rougher and warmer than that.
What people ask, usually the morning of.
How long should it run?
Set a length and the draft is timed to match, arriving with a second cut at roughly half the length — handy when the buffet is already laid out and two other people still have to speak. Two or three minutes suits a colleague; go longer only if you managed them for years and you are the sole speaker.
I am a peer, not their manager. Is that odd?
No — say exactly that in the answer about who you are to them. A peer's speech is often the warmest one in the room, because it comes from someone who sat next to the 8:55 coffee and the reply-all everyone dreaded, not someone reading their leaving report. Tell it your real vantage point and it writes from that.
There was a restructure recently. Do I mention it?
Only if you want to, and only in your own words. There is a field for anything to be careful of in the room, and it is honoured completely — it will not guess why someone is retiring, and it will never write a line that only makes sense if the retirement was not entirely their choice, unless you tell it that is the case.
I am not naturally funny and do not want to force it.
Say so in the tone answer and you get a sincere speech instead of a comic one with the jokes removed. Warm, dry, plain and mostly serious are all instructions it takes. What actually lands in a retirement speech is specific recognition — the habit everyone in the office would recognise instantly — which does not require a joke to work.
Two of us are speaking. Will we repeat the same stories?
Very likely, unless you compare notes first — the one thing on this list the tool cannot fix for you. Tell it who else is speaking if you know, and give it your own stories rather than the office favourites everyone already knows, so your speech has somewhere to go the other one has not already been.
There is a gift or a card. How does that land?
Tell it what is being presented and the speech ends with a short line that hands over to it, so the room knows to look up rather than the speech trailing off into silence while someone fetches a bag from behind reception.
Ready to write it?
Set aside ten honest minutes for the questions — that is genuinely where the entire speech comes from. Go in already knowing your two or three stories.
Top up once. No subscription. About 28p — never more than 40p.