AiC Episode 84

In this episode, Teri welcomes David Ciccarelli, the Co-Founder and CEO of Voices.com, the online marketplace that connects business people with professional voice over talent.

Welcome, David!

Voices.com helps developers or anyone else that wants to create Alexa skills to have the best sounding voices for their skills. Creators of Alexa skills use different voices from the typical Alexa voice in order to differentiate their skills from others. David comes on to talk all about using voices for voice technology and much more.

Voices.com

  • They started over 10 years ago and choose to focus on being a voice-oriented freelancer platform.
  • David’s background is in audio engineering and his co-founder, who is also his wife, is a classically trained singer with a music degree specializing in voice. They are very passionate about the voice technology space.

The Thought Process of Creating a Skill

  • One should think of it like a two-by-two matrix where on the horizontal axis is time (a shorter time period of voice prompts versus longer time periods) and on the vertical axis is the quality of voice.
  • If one has relatively static content, it’s better to have a voice talent record that out because they are trying to invoke emotion or instructions in a more educational way.
  • One should also consider the type of interactions they want in their skill. They can be transactional, informational or educational.

How a Skill Creator/Developer Chooses the Voice to Use

  • The creators/developers will usually already have a suitable voice in their head that they want for their skill, just like how someone imagines the logo for their brand before it’s created.
  • The decision tree consists of the desired language, accent, age, and gender, and the decision maker also considers the role of the voice and style of how the voice says things. Once they come up with their criteria, they go on to Voices.com and select a couple of voice actors to audition for the project.
  • They can also choose to post their project describing in detail who they are looking for, what they need read, when they need it by, and their budget range. Voices.com has a technology called “Voice Match” through which they take those inputs of what the creator/developer is looking for, match it up against the hundreds of thousands of profiles, and select/invite only the most qualified talent for that job.

Voice Actors for Alexa Skills with David Ciccarelli of Voices.com

Being Part of the Voice Technology Community

  • Voice applications is an emerging category of work on Voices.com.
  • A lot of clients looking into the category are people or brands who want to create different types of voice applications for both Alexa and Google Assistant including flash briefings.
  • They commissioned some market research through a partnership with VoiceBot.ai to find out if brands, brand managers and marketers are ready for building voice apps.

Product Improvements

  • They are shifting into working with large organizations that might have 500+ employees that are more driven around collaboration and are doing more exciting projects. Voices.com has built out a suite of collaboration tools where they can invite other users within their company onto the platform to listen, evaluate, rate and vote on the voice talent that might become their brand voice.
  • They are looking at incorporating other enterprise-grade tools, for example, around procurement or having a private cloud of pre-selected brand voices.

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

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