Do you have multimedia content that could benefit from the addition of multilingual voiceover? You might be surprised how much you can get done these days while staying withing your localization budget.
When the goal of voiceover is basic communication audio, high-end voiceover talent is often not necessary anymore. Computer-generated voiceover can accomplish this goal at a fraction of the cost involved with hiring human voiceover actors. Voice instruction for technical videos, narration of online texts, and automated customer service responses do not usually need to convey complex human emotions and personalities, and this makes these projects good candidates for human-like voiceover technology.
In fact, even when tone, interpretation, emotion, and accurate responses are important in a project, advanced text-to-speech voiceover technology is becoming viable as an alternative to expensive voice actor voiceover. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is AI that enables machines to understand and respond to language with quite human-sounding voices. Neural TTS is a type of text-to-speech technology that uses neural networks to produce more natural-sounding speech. Algorithms that detect a speaker’s patterns of intonation, stresses, and pauses, enable computer-generated voices to even convey emotion. As recently as the beginning of 2023 technology has become available to clone specific human beings’ voices. The field is evolving quickly.
There are bad actors using this technology already, of course – scams and audio fakes are even easier to produce with convincingly human-sounding AI voiceover. And there are long-term ethical and practical considerations to be contended with and sorted through with computer-generated voiceover that may sound so human that it’s hard to tell it isn’t real.
But on the positive side, there are enormous opportunities that open up when adding translated voiceover to your communication is not prohibitively expensive. For a small target language population, for instance, it has suddenly become affordable to add text-to-speech voiceover to all types of communication they need in order to understand and enjoy their connection with your product. Companies with international clientele can reach everyone in all their markets with customized voiceover; suddenly it’s much more affordable and faster to create translated service communication, e-learning modules, games, ads, and everything else you can think of.
Skrivanek offers production and integration of precise text-to-speech voiceover in any of over 80 languages. We can take your original source language text and generate translations, then create the voiceover with just the right tone to fit your product and message. Our cultural and linguistic understanding of your final target market(s) enables us to ensure that the text-to-speech voiceover we produce for your video, game, website, or customer service, is appealing to your target audience. You can add multilingual voiceover to an entire marketing campaign or educational series for far less than this would have cost in the recent past. Contact us to find out exactly how we can give a clear, human-like voice to your communication in multiple markets – while staying within your localization budget.
J. V. McShulskis
