In a market full of noise, brand voice matters. While marketers used to have to rely on time-intensive, cost-prohibitive processes to create the right voice for their marketing campaigns, today’s world is full of technological innovations that make it easy to create a high-quality, efficient, and cost-effective voice over.
In this blog post, we cover the most common marketing uses of AI voice for marketing teams, advantages of AI voices versus human actors, and the types of AI voices you can choose from.
Common Uses of AI Voice for Marketing Teams
Marketing teams use voice overs for everything from ads, to website content, to product video voice overs, and more. Sometimes marketing teams may even help create voice overs for other company departments or in-house brand initiatives like learning and development content. Here are just a few ways AI voice supercharges this work.
Social Media Ads
If you have ever run a PPC campaign, you know that social media ads are a powerful tool. Whether it’s a Facebook video ad or Instagram spot, adding a high-quality voice element heightens your success.
Brand Videos
Marketing teams know the pain of having to redo a product tour video or demo footage every time the offering changes. With AI voices, fresh content is a breeze. Update your video content as often as necessary, without worrying about voice talent availability or price.
Audio Advertising
Every time you listen to a podcast or stream music, you’re likely to hear audio ads. With AI voice technology, you can test dozens of slightly different ads across multiple platforms to find your optimal result.
Top 3 Advantages of AI voices vs. Human Actors for Marketing Teams
There are a number of reasons why AI voices support marketing teams more than the historical route of voice overs via only human actors.
Advantage #1: Efficient Voice Over Production
For one, efficiency. Marketers notoriously juggle many responsibilities; scheduling a human voice actor adds a sizable amount of unnecessary work to their plate. Not only does coordinating a human actor require demoing several voices, booking a recording studio, scheduling takes and retakes, but it can take months to complete each of these tasks and the countless coordination between them. Whereas, with AI voices, marketers can swiftly decide on a Voice Avatar for their brand, upload a script, download the voice over and be on their way. All editing and post-production can be done within a single system, when convenient.
Advantage #2: Cost Savings
As you can imagine, this process saves a considerable amount of time, and thus, money. In fact, a 30-minute voice over, when recorded in house, costs around $450. With a human actor, the cost nearly doubles to around $749. However, that same voice over costs only $5.88 when recorded with a voice over platform like WellSaid Labs. When you factor in human time spent operating the platform, the cost still only amounts to a budget-friendly $78.
Advantage #3: Consistent Voice Over Quality
Another benefit of AI voices vs. human actors, especially when recorded in-house, is quality. While Connie from accounting can double as a voice actor in a pinch, a high-quality, natural-sounding AI voice reflects a brand professionally. Creating a high-quality voice over requires sophisticated recording equipment, room acoustics, microphones and software. Most companies don’t have a room perfectly dialed in for this. AI voices enable marketers to tap a few buttons on a computer for a crisp, ultra-professional sounding voice over—no professional recording studio or in-house makeshift studio required.
Types of AI Voice Overs: Studio or Custom
Once you’re on board with all the massive potential AI voice overs can provide for marketing teams, you may be wondering exactly *which* AI voice over to choose.
One option that many marketing teams favor is creating a custom AI voice from a human voice. If, for example, you have a well-known corporate leader whom you want to be the face (and voice) of your company, you could create an AI voice out of their likeness—with their permission, of course. Some AI voice over software, including WellSaid Labs, can create an AI Voice Avatar from a specific human’s voice, so you can upload scripts, then render them in your executive’s likeness.
If you want a brand voice but don’t have a specific human voice in mind, you could choose from a text-to-speech platform. WellSaid Labs provides this functionality as well, enabling you to choose from several natural-sounding Voice Avatars to select the one right for your brand. From there, you can easily upload your scripts, literally converting text to speech.
WellSaid Labs is one of the higher-end, more human-sounding AI voice over platforms. There are many other text-to-speech technologies out there, but you run the risk of the voices sounding eerily robotic.
AI voice over is one of the most promising technological innovations for marketing teams, offering the potential to scale with voice in a more efficient, realistic-sounding, and cost-effective way than ever before. Add this incredible tech to your marketing campaigns today!
