diff --git a/code/__HELPERS/text.dm b/code/__HELPERS/text.dm
index d8fbb6b40d3..77764634d8c 100644
--- a/code/__HELPERS/text.dm
+++ b/code/__HELPERS/text.dm
@@ -68,6 +68,27 @@
 /proc/adminscrub(t,limit=MAX_MESSAGE_LEN)
 	return copytext((html_encode(strip_html_simple(t))),1,limit)
 
+/**
+  * Perform a whitespace cleanup on the text, similar to what HTML renderers do
+  *
+  * This is useful if you want to better predict how text is going to look like when displaying it to a user
+  * HTML renderers collapse multiple whitespaces into one, trims prepending and appending spaces, among other things. This proc attempts to do the same thing.
+  * HTML5 defines whitespace pretty much exactly like regex defines the \s group, [ \t\r\n\f].
+  * Arguments:
+  * * t - The text to "render"
+  */
+/proc/htmlrendertext(t)
+	// Trim "whitespace" by lazily capturing word characters in the middle
+	var/static/regex/matchMiddle = new(@"^\s*([\W\w]*?)\s*$")
+	if(matchMiddle.Find(t) == 0)
+		return t
+	t = matchMiddle.group[1]
+
+	// Replace any non-space whitespace characters with spaces, and also multiple occurences with just one space
+	var/static/regex/matchSpacing = new(@"\s+", "g")
+	t = replacetext(t, matchSpacing, " ")
+
+	return t
 
 //Returns null if there is any bad text in the string
 /proc/reject_bad_text(text, max_length = 512, ascii_only = TRUE)
diff --git a/code/modules/assembly/voice.dm b/code/modules/assembly/voice.dm
index 70af1573f3e..6aa7110cb60 100644
--- a/code/modules/assembly/voice.dm
+++ b/code/modules/assembly/voice.dm
@@ -32,6 +32,10 @@
 	if(speaker == src)
 		return
 
+	// raw_message can contain multiple spaces between words etc which are not seen in chat due to HTML rendering
+	// this means if the teller records a message with e.g. double spaces or tabs, other people will not be able to trigger the sensor since they don't know how to perform the same combination
+	raw_message = htmlrendertext(raw_message)
+
 	if(listening && !radio_freq)
 		record_speech(speaker, raw_message, message_language)
 	else