Saturday, November 19, 2011

The worst voice over audition of all time?

I recently posted a project on one of those pay to play websites the doesn't really cater specifically to VO work. I received 11 auditions. In the project specs I asked all bidders to record a short paragraph from the actual script I had attached, read by a native English speaker. Only a few sent in the requested demo. The rest just submitted their standard demo 'reel', except for one bidder, from Romania, who sent in the most unbelievable audition demo I had ever heard. His bid was ridiculously low, then I played his demo and found out why.


I was totally blown away. I was expecting to hear a Romanian accent but instead, this bidder actually sent in a recording of a 'text to voice' synthesizer program that had amazing quality! The first few words sounded very good. Then it became obvious that it was a synthesized voice. Oh, the advent of new digital technology!

But, that got me thinking..."How much longer will it be before that program can be improved to a point where it perfectly replicates or emulates the human voice?"  Will that signal the end of VO's as we know it? Will people soon be able to enter text into a program and output a totally believable sounding voice over in a style of their choosing?  The VO industry has taken SO many hits in the past decade. Will this inevitably be the final blow to VO?

To finish belaboring this point, have you seen the quality of the CGI avatars in the latest video games and on-line virtual worlds lately?  They have made them almost totally photo realistic. How long until they perfect the appearance of a real person with realistic facial movement and then to couple that with the perfectly emulated voice of your choice? Will that be the end of not only off screen VO but, on screen as well? 

If these trends continue...where will our true online 'human' interaction emanate from in the future? Will we even feel the need to speak to each other one day? Will we eventually choose an avatar and a digital voice that will from then on be representative of our on line persona and be reduced to simply using just the written word, digitally transformed, as our newly preferred form of web discourse? 

That concept kinda freaks me out but, I did read "Future Shock" so, I am prepared for things advancing quicker than I can process them but, I will always adapt to the world around me.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for sharing your experience with us. That’s a awesome article you posted. I found the post very useful as well as interesting. English voice overs

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