Ode Brings Together AI and the Power of Poetry
Ode Poetry, Gravity Road, and Microsoft AI combine AI voice and humanity’s oldest form of literary expression.
LONDON, UK – July 9, 2026 – For millennia, people have turned to poetry for comfort, clarity, and connection. Now, AI is bringing a personalised poetry experience to you, anywhere, whenever you need it.
Ode Poetry, a social enterprise founded by William Sieghart and Amelia Richards, whose mission is to spread the healing power of poetry, has today launched Ode, a free AI experience, based on the concept that there is a poem to provide comfort and inspiration for every mood and feeling.
Inspired by William Sieghart’s best-selling Poetry Pharmacy anthologies, Ode engages with how a user is feeling and prescribes a poem that resonates with their mood. While the app is powered by advanced voice and transcription models, it is trained on hand-crafted prescriptions, and real poems read by real actors, preserving the human creativity of the experience. All permissions for use of content and voices have been secured.
The origin of Ode Poetry was a series of intimate face-to-face poetry sessions held by William at literary events up and down the country. The response from participants was so powerful that William was inspired to write three Poetry Pharmacy anthologies, published by Penguin.
Ode has been designed and built by creative studio Gravity Road, and powered by Microsoft AI’s latest voice and transcription models, creating a digital experience scaling the prescriptions to a wider audience while maintaining the intimacy of in-person consultations.
At the heart of Ode is an AI taking on William’s persona. “William” serves as a narrator and confidant who guides users through a short, real-time conversation about how they’re feeling and prescribes a poem from a curated library. Well known poems are delivered using pre-recorded human voices, including celebrity readers such as Stephen Fry and Harriet Walter, Indira Varma, and Dominic West.
Ode chose two Microsoft AI models, MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-Transcribe-1, to power the experience. Microsoft AI’s state-of-the-art MAI-Voice-1 model recreates William’s voice persona, using the model’s ability to generate highly natural, expressive speech that captures the intonation, rhythm, and emotional range of a real speaker. A carefully crafted and art directed prompting approach results in an authentic reproduction of William’s distinctive style and approach.
Microsoft AI’s MAI-Transcribe-1, a state-of-the-art speech-to-text model, ensures that “William” hears the user clearly, accurately capturing their words so the experience can respond with clarity and understanding. The result is a conversation that feels natural and personal.
The resulting human connection reflects Microsoft’s AI mission: to create AI technology that empowers people, respects creativity, and supports wellbeing.
Ode explores a simple but powerful idea: that the right words, shared at the right moment, can help. From William Sieghart’s distinctive voice and lifetime of poetry expertise to the decision to feature real human performances from celebrated readers, the AI-powered Ode app places creativity and authenticity at its centre. The Ode web app is available now at odepoetry.ai.
Ode delivers the power of poetry in a new, accessible way. As William himself puts it: “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.”
William Sieghart, Creator of The Poetry Pharmacy & Ode, said:
“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.”
Mark Eaves, Co-Founder of Gravity Road, said:
“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.”
Trevor Back, Product Lead at Microsoft AI, said:
“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.”