Today, digital experiences span across many devices and formats. Content creators engage their audiences with new immersive technologies. The closer these experiences get to us as people, the deeper the connections we develop. How we experience the marvels of these experiences and how we employ modern tools to teach, inform, and entertain continues to evolve. What once was a hobbyists’ toolkit became a personal computer for all. A personal computer that grew its interconnectedness and shortened the distance between people.
The Graphical User Interface (GUI) was instrumental in enabling billions of people to use computers. It brought the visual elements we humans crave so much to this new medium. It made it easier for us to tell the machine what to do. As our dependency on digital technology increases, so too does our need to feel one with it.
Enter voice.
Voice as an interface between people and computers builds upon the GUI’s foundation. The right voice can help us pay more attention, retain information better, and get lost in the intricacies of a great story.
Creatives, educators, and product developers are now embracing voice as an interface — as a new medium for personalizing content. Investments in enabling voice at scale tell us so. Simply deploying a computer voice falls short of our desire to create connections. Optimizing for scale, without perfecting the human interaction is going backwards, not forward. In a world where almost everything around us speaks, we need a voice worth listening to.
What is a Voice Avatar?
A Voice Avatar is the synthetic version of a human voice. At WellSaid, we create Voice Avatars using the voices of real people. We work closely with brands and voice actors to design the style and personality of the Voice Avatar in accordance with the type of content to be produced with it. We then apply our proprietary Artificial Intelligence technology to convert the narration into a natural-sounding AI model.
Synthetic voices are not new. In fact, we invite you to speak aloud how you imagine a computer sounds. Seriously, go ahead.
Did you just speak like a robot?
In reality, the way you naturally speak is closer to how a WellSaid Voice Avatar sounds. That is the level of humanity we seek to enable. The right Voice Avatar accomplishes more than simply deploying voice at scale. The right Voice Avatar captures the essence of the person who lends us their voice to create an AI model. Brands and content creators who care about quality understand the difference between just creating a lot of content and producing the highest quality possible for their audiences to enjoy.
Voice Avatars take in plain text and produce a voiceover from it — in real time. If you can write an email, you can get a Voice Avatar to create a voiceover in a few clicks. There are different levels of technical complexity when it comes to getting Voice Avatars to behave as you wish. At WellSaid, we developed a groundbreaking approach to speech synthesis that doesn’t require creatives to mess with the technical aspects of the voice. Once the persona of the Voice Avatar is defined, the voiceover you can render will naturally mimic the unique characteristics of the actor used to create the Voice Avatar.
There are many uses for Voice Avatars. Corporate training creators get to produce and publish content faster with engaging narration for their learners, ad pros create hip commercials with a newfound repository of diversity and styles, and developers expand the ways end users get to interact with their apps and services. Voice is here to stay. Voice Avatars give you the ability to tell stories and connect with customers and audiences in ways that simply can’t be reasonably done, properly and economically, without AI.
Why do brands need their own Voice Avatar?
Obviously, brands need to connect with people. The world is increasingly noisy and producers are fighting for attention across all kinds of media. Brands seek to win and influence people with stories. But when everyone is telling variations of the same story, it is extremely difficult to differentiate what’s being offered. Add to the mix the inability to establish a unique look-and-feel that allows people to associate your stories, and themselves, to your brand. AI Voice Avatars are instrumental in helping you achieve that connection.
Of course, we believe producing with a voice worth listening to is key. Thousands of customers building content with WellSaid Avatars, who share their successes with us, agree. Conversion rates are higher for Sales teams when they switch to a natural sounding Voice Avatar on their automated emails. eLearning Developers and Instructional designers love the superpower they gain from the ability to add multiple characters to learning modules, without any delay to their productions. Advertisers and storytellers love the speed gained by having multiple producers create with the same voice — at once.
Any brand, any company, that wishes to create content for the modern world must find out how to employ voice to the best of their ability. Compelling storytelling demands a good narrator.
Voice Avatars Have Several Benefits
Using a Voice Avatar over traditional methods leads to proven operational gains. It is more cost effective, retakes are easier and faster, and workflow bottlenecks disappear. One doesn’t even have to creative to make contributions to a production. Adding Voice Avatars to your media production toolkit augments your team’s ability to keep content fresh while remaining nimble and agile.
At WellSaid, we have a highly curated marketplace of Voice Avatars everyone can create with. For brands who require a very specific voice style, or have a spokesperson whose likeness is integral to the brand’s identity, creating their own Voice Avatar is a must. Owning a Voice Avatar gives you exclusive rights to access and create with a synthetic voice.
