About the person, not the company.
It happens most weeks, somewhere in most offices, and it is nearly always assigned to whoever is free the day before. This job writes the speech about the colleague who is going — never a word about how the company handled it, whatever actually happened.
The one thing a generic chatbot cannot know: which reason to leave out.
Ask a free chatbot for a leaving speech and it writes something serviceable and generic — "we wish them well in this exciting new chapter" — because it has no idea whether the person is off to a better job, was made redundant last month, or left after a dispute nobody in the room wants named out loud. A generic answer picks the cheeriest guess by default, which is exactly the wrong move roughly as often as it is right.
This job never guesses. A new job, redundancy, a dismissal, a straightforward move on: all four read identically in a thin brief, and the prompt is written to treat "I don't know" as the honest answer rather than picking the nicest-sounding one. Leave the reason out and the speech simply does not mention it.
The same discipline runs the other way too. If you supply a detail that edges toward a comment on the company — a restructure, a grievance, how it was handled — the speech will not use it. It stays about the person, on purpose, every time.
What it builds from your answers.
Nine short questions: who is leaving and who you are to them, how long they were there and doing what, what they were actually like day to day, two or three safe-to-tell stories, where they are headed next if you know it, who is in the room, tone, length, and whether a card or gift is being handed over. Back comes a speech, a shorter cut, cue cards and delivery notes.
Here is the kind of detail that carries the whole speech, and what the tool does with it.
He answers every email within about four minutes, including at half ten at night, and none of us has ever actually asked him to stop. Nobody knows how he does it and it is genuinely going to be strange without it.
There is a specific kind of quiet panic that hits when you send [ADD FACT: his name] an email at ten thirty at night, purely to get it off your own plate before bed, and a reply lands four minutes later anyway. Nobody has ever asked him to stop doing that. Nobody is entirely sure how.
It is a small thing to build a reputation on, and it is exactly the sort of thing this room is going to notice the absence of first.
Notice what was left alone: no theory about why the late replies happened, no invented backstory about workload or burnout, and nothing said about whether the company should have done anything differently. One true, specific habit, left to speak for itself.
From a blank form to a speech, in three moves.
- Fill in the form. Whatever you write in the stories box is doing most of the work — a couple of moments the team would actually recognise beat three paragraphs of "he'll be missed", so that box asks for length rather than letting you skip it.
- 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.
- You get four documents back. A full speech to read from, a tighter cut in case the room is already restless, cue cards, and notes on where to pause.
A run that produces nothing spends nothing.
Who this suits.
Worth it if
- Somebody handed you this job yesterday for a leaving do that's today.
- You would rather leave the reason for their leaving out of it altogether.
- There's a bit of the story you specifically do not want touched, and you would rather it stayed untouched than clumsily fudged.
- You've got a couple of decent stories and no spare hour to turn them into something you can stand up and say.
- A gift is coming out at the end and the last line needs to walk straight into it.
Not worth it if
- What you actually want is a speech that airs how the company handled things. This tool is built to refuse that, whatever you type into it.
- You barely knew them. Genuine closeness cannot be manufactured, and their actual colleagues will hear the gap immediately.
- You're hoping for a line about the new job, the notice period, or the way the announcement went down. None of that makes it in.
- You plan to read straight off a phone with zero practice. It's written to be said aloud, and one run-through still helps.
What people ask, usually the morning of.
Do I have to say why they are leaving?
No. Skip it, or write exactly what you're comfortable saying — either way the job does not fill in the blank itself. A new role, a redundancy, being let go, a dispute, or simply moving on all sound alike from the outside, so none of them gets assumed.
Can it mention the redundancy, or how the company handled it?
Deliberately not. Whatever the real story is, the draft keeps its attention on the colleague leaving and refuses to turn a stray remark into commentary on a restructure or a grievance, even where you have supplied one.
I am not their manager, just a colleague. Does that matter?
Tell it that plainly when it asks who you are to them. Some of the best leaving speeches come from a desk-neighbour rather than whoever technically owns the job of giving one.
How long should a leaving speech run?
Whatever length you type is what the draft is timed against, plus a second, shorter cut for a clock-watching room. Two minutes covers most Friday-afternoon send-offs; save the longer version for a decade-long colleague where you're the only one speaking.
There is a card everyone signed. How does that land?
Say what's being handed over and the closing line walks straight into that moment, so everyone's attention is already up rather than the speech petering out while someone finds where the card went.
We don't know where they're headed next. Is that a problem?
Not at all — skip that field and the speech simply says nothing about it. There is no invented next chapter waiting to fill the gap.
Ready to write it?
The questions take about ten minutes and they are genuinely where the speech comes from — have your one or two stories ready before you start.
Top up once. No subscription. About 28p — never more than 40p.