“Hey Alexa, look up how smart speakers will change the voiceover business.” After 25+ years in the voice production business, we don’t need an algorithm to tell us that virtual assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Cortana have seriously changed the game of voiceover work and we foresee features like this will only ramp up in the year(s) to come. Voice recording for virtual assistants is an incredible opportunity for the voiceover industry to step up its game and show why, at its heart, voiceover work is human connection work.
Let’s start with the basics: voice recording for virtual assistants is here to make our lives easier. Take Amazon’s Echo—this smart speaker has over 7,000 apps or services it can use to help out at home or work. Internet searches, grocery list making, playing music and more. The voice recording for this virtual assistant takes human connection to a whole new level. I mean, who else are you going to share your grocery list with and have them read it back to you?!
Voice based technical interfaces like smart speakers listen, learn, and react to your voice–your specific human voice–and respond with a human voice all their own. Many of us have heard Susan Bennett (who voices Apple’s “Siri”) many times over without even realizing it, and Nina Rolle (the original voice of Amazon’s “Alexa”) has helped us out time and time again with our needs and wants. It’s voice recording like this that makes jobs like ours so special. Professional voiceover is able to take a piece of tech equipment and instill human connection into its very being. Sometimes that voice can make a person who just lost someone a little less lonely. Sometimes it can help children boost their confidence when they ask the device to play a song and suddenly it booms over the room. Either way, we love the direction that voice recording for virtual assistants is headed, and we can’t wait to see how this part of our industry will blossom next.
If you’d like to learn more about voice recording or how partnering with a voice production studio like ours can make possibilities like this happen, contact us! We’d love to show you why our studio is top notch when it comes to voiceover talent, work, and the future of voiceover.
