If you use narration voice-overs in your training projects, you’re undoubtedly familiar with how difficult it is to find a colleague to help do your voice-over, the challenge of booking their time and scheduling retakes. And not to mention the massive amount of editing during post-production to get the polished, professional voice-overs because it’s tough to listen to a recording full of pops, white noise, and other distractions. The struggle is real. It’s time consuming, long and most times frustrating when there are changes.
A good voice-over must sound human and not robotic.
To overcome some of these challenges, I reverted to using text-to-speech (TTS) software. But using text-to-speech software brings other challenges. I spent countless hours and several dollars trying to find the right tool to do the job. A few themes of challenges I encountered:
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- Sounding robotic – Much as they try to convince you the synthetic voice-over is natural speech sounding, the voice still sounds synthetic
- Pronunciation of words – If the organization you work for uses acronyms and lingos, prepare yourself for another layer of challenges. You’ll come across poorly pronounced words
- Accents – I found a lot of effort is placed on US (North American) English accent in text-to-speech tools. When choosing other accents, the voice becomes more robotic and the amount of words are pronounced wrong
- Languages – Just like accents, developers put a lot of effort on US (North American) English. When choosing another language to do text-to-speech, save your time. I recommend hiring voice-talent to do your voice-overs for your projects.
Imagine being able to create a human-sounding voice-over in mere seconds.
Everyone can tolerate mediocre voice-overs, but I will rapidly reach for the kill switch on anything that sounds muddy, fuzzy, or annoying. And undoubtedly, if the voice isn’t pristine, learners will get distracted by it and don’t, optimally, focus on the lesson.
Using voice-over narration in my projects is part of my core multi-media toolkit. When I stumbled across Speechelo™, a text-to-speech software, it brought natural human expressions into text-to-speech. It overcame the challenge of finding voice-talent, booking time and scheduling retakes. And eliminated the need for post-production editing.
Speechelo™ is the best online text-to-speech conversion software I have found so far.
Using Speechelo™ allowed me to create human-sounding voice-over in mere seconds. The tool is simple to use and intuitive. To create voice-overs, you simply paste your text into online tool and the integrated A.I. engine will run through the text, add punctuation, and insert notations needed to ensure a natural-sounding speech. You can layer in the choice of voice, generate it, and download it as an .mp3 for your projects.
The cost is a one-time fee (USD) for the standard basic plan, which I found affordable. But you have the option to upgrade to Speechelo™ Pro. With the Pro version, users will have a bigger variety of voices to choose from, different accents, a variety of background music, etc. Be mindful, a handful of voices still sound synthetic but it will take time to find the core voices you want to use.
Some of you may think that voice-talent is so much better. And maybe it is, but this is the next best option.
Try adding Speechelo™ to your multi-media toolkit. It’s saved me time, eliminated massive amounts of editing during post-production, definitely increased my productivity, and provided that professional, polished narration to my projects.