VO-BB - 19 YEARS OLD!

[Living Culture]

The E-learning guild are having an online forum for "Audio, Video, and Rich Media for eLearning" next month which looks pretty interesting. There is one session which got my attention:

The Human Factor: Making the Case for Voiceovers in eLearning
http://www.elearningguild.com/online-forums/concurrent-sessions/session-details.cfm?session=3148

But definitely did interest me enough to pay $495 for registration.

So... since I think it is a topic that would interest many of you, we can discuss it here for the awesomely low price of everybody's 2c.

Anybody game?
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Mandarin Chinese Voiceovers & Localization
http://lcmsmedia.com
http://imagesbykenny.com/

[Monk]

I do work for a company out of Southern Cal, called Say Designs. I've been reading scripts for an eLearning project and have kept busy.

It's really refined my setup/recording/editing technique when doing 10 scripts a day. My microphone is pretty quiet, the gate has a 2.8:1 knee with a -50db setting to quickly remove breaths and I'm enjoying learning about things from Shakespeare to DNA.

They seem wicked pissa happy with me and I'm going to miss it once the project wraps up. But I'm sure I'll get more!
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Company, villainous company, hath been the spoil of me...

www.monksvoice.com

[Scott Pollak]

I, too, do a ton of e-learning narration, and have now for about 4 years or so. I actually have 2 or 3 companies who send me work on at least a weekly basis, and others that I hear from less often.

While not terribly exciting work, there are several things I personally like about it.

- Each job is different, oriented towards a different age range and audience. One day I might be narrating biology or trig for 11th graders and the next it might be safety narration for adults. As such, I always remember who it is that will be listening to me and adjust my delivery to suit the listener.
- It is extremely steady work and can pay quite nicely. Once an e-learning company uses you and likes you, they just keep coming back. And the ones who I do work for on a weekly basis pay extremely fast; normally within a week or less!
- I like the fact that my voice is helping kids to learn. Rather than urging someone to "Buy now with zero percent interest and no money down!!!", I am, instead, using my talents to actually help tomorrow's leaders get smarter. It's a nice feeling.

This type of work will only increase as businesses, institutions and schools try to keep costs down and improve retention and the learning curve. It's SO much cheaper for them to have a student (or employee) log on and learn, interactively, at their own rate, than have one teacher try to slog through a class of 30 kids (all at different levels of comprehension) trying to make headway on a topic.
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Scott R. Pollak
Clients include Pandora, NPR Atlanta, Wells Fargo, Cisco, Humana, Publix, UPS, AT&T, HP, Xerox and more.

www.voicebyscott.com

[Mike Harrison]

One of the first blog posts on eLearning I ran across a year or two ago was on the subject of using professional voice talent vs. SMEs (Subject Matter Experts). I can't find that blog right now, but it said how an unofficial survey revealed that a majority of eLearners preferred the delivery of a SME over a professional narrator because they immediately sensed more credibility from the SME, despite that the SME's delivery was not nearly as polished as that of a pro. Erratic pauses, 'Umms,' 'Ahhs,'momentary stumbles and other things were simply ignored. The learners felt more confident being taught by a SME.

My argument was that a professional narrator with the 'right stuff' knows how to build an appropriate level of credibility into their delivery. Also, while a SME may sound more credible, would they have a voice and the skill to adapt it based on the subject matter to make it engaging over the long haul, as a pro would?

But put all that aside, because then I ran across another topic.

There's been for at least a year, now, a lot of discussion on the topic of using TTS (text-to-speech) technology instead of human voice talent in eLearning applications. On one such blog, both Jeffrey Kafer and I (and several others) have politely questioned the efficacy of eLearning in such cases.

Listening to a GPS device for driving directions is one thing. But who would be able to listen to that type of verbal spillage for any length of time in a learning situation? Developers have made advances such that the robotic sound is gone, but real narrators instinctively place emphasis on the correct syllables and words, add a momentary pause here and there for additional emphasis. We can add emotion by getting softer or louder, or by raising or lowering our pitch. All instinctively.

At some point after presenting those facts came news that developers were now playing with punctuation and HTML code to add those nuances to their TTS voices. It became clear to me that the wheel was being reinvented. If one of the prime goals of using TTS was to save money, how would that be possible when programmers would have to tweak almost every word to make them sound more human?

Here is one of the first blogs on the subject of TTS I read:

http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2010/06/text-to-speech-overview-and-nlp-quality.html

And here is the blog post on using punctuation and HTML code to 'improve' TTS in eLearning:

http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2010/10/using-punctuation-and-mark-up-language.html

There are many other pieces and opinions out there. Just Google 'em.
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Mike
Male Voice Over Talent
I have taken leave of my sensors.

[Living Culture]

Thanks for interesting links.