My attention has been drawn to a recent presentation, made at the Adobe MAX 2016 conference in San Diego, which I believe has major implications for those of us working as voice overs and those thinking of getting into voice work.
Xeyu Jin took to the stage to demonstrate the new VoCo software.  Apparently once the software has been able to analyse up to 20 minutes of dialogue it can then be used to synthesize new words using the voice of the recording to say things that were not in the initial recording. The person using the software just types in the words they want and the software delivers those words as audio.

You can see the presentation here in this YouTube video

Apparently Adobe don’t have plans at this stage to release this software commercially but it is very likely that it will be available in the near future. In some of the reports on this presentation some bloggers and journalists wondered if there really was a market for what some are calling “the photoshop of audio”. Personally I could imagine that a lot of IVR/on-hold messages and most, if not all, e-learning work, as well as countless “explainer” video narrations, could be done using this kind of system.

In fact ever since Siri came out I’ve been expecting someone to develop a program that allows you to type in, or load in, your script and then the computer creates the voice over for you. In terms of the Siri approach the only involvement for a voice artist is at the beginning where a voice is sampled that is then used as the basis for the synthesized words. Worse still Jon Briggs, who was the original voice for the UK version of Siri, only got paid for the initial voice recording session: there was no fee for its usage in millions of iPhones. He talked about it in a Guardian interview last year.

If you are toying with the idea of getting into voice over you might want to think about the fact that, although there is quite a lot of work around at the moment, it won’t be long before much of it is automated.
If you are already in the voice over industry you may want to think about the business model you are going to adopt in the coming years when much of the bread and butter work is disappearing? Maybe you need to diversify?

Ironically this week I was recording an English voice over for a studio in Portugal, the content of which was all to do with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics and how its going to change all sorts of economic sectors. It got me thinking maybe VOs should diversify into building robots….. looks like that sector has got a future.

Chris Radley
Male Voice Over