Voiceovers

The Voiceover plugin turns a PDF slide deck into a narrated MP4 video and a text transcript. Hand Claude a PDF of your slides and say “make a narrated video from this deck.” Claude drafts the narration for each slide, a local app lets you review and edit the script, pick a voice, and generate the video. The finished .mp4 and .txt land in your working directory, ready to post to your course site or share with students.

Key features:

  • Claude writes the narration. It reads the slide content, understands the flow, and drafts a natural spoken script — one segment per slide. You review and edit before generating.
  • Choose from a library of voices. The app uses ElevenLabs for high-quality, natural-sounding speech synthesis. An ElevenLabs API key is required (a free tier is available).
  • Saved by name. Each deck is saved so you can reopen it later to tweak the narration and regenerate without starting over.
  • Runs entirely locally. Inside Academic Studio, the app opens in an in-editor browser tab. In VS Code or Claude Code CLI, it opens a separate browser tab. Students receive only the finished video and transcript — they run nothing.

Requirements

  • An ElevenLabs API key (free tier available; Claude will walk you through setup the first time).
  • Quarto (installed via Help → Run Setup… in Academic Studio).

Installation

Open Help → Run Setup…, follow the “Teaching & research plugins” link, and check Voiceover Builder. One click installs it. Quarto is on the same setup screen under Supporting programs, if you don’t already have it.

Run Setup is also where updates appear — it flags a new version of the plugin when one is available, so you don’t need to download a new copy of Academic Studio to get it. The installed plugin lives in your shared Claude configuration, so it works from Claude Code CLI and the Code mode of Claude Desktop too.

Academic Studio is not required. The plugin is published in the kerryback/skills marketplace, so you can install it into Claude Code directly:

/plugin marketplace add kerryback/skills
/plugin install voiceover@kerryback-skills

Adding the marketplace is a one-time step — every other plugin on this site installs from it the same way. The same two commands work from a terminal without an interactive session, as claude plugin marketplace add kerryback/skills and claude plugin install voiceover@kerryback-skills.