How To Voiceover A Video And Minimize Your eLearning Production Costs

How To Voiceover A Video And Minimize Your eLearning Production Costs
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Summary: Creating attention-holding L&D content isn’t easy. Even if your content is stellar, you have to find the voice that does it justice. The voice that makes your content come to life, appropriately fits your situation—oh, and doesn’t cost a fortune.

How To Voiceover A Video Without Going Over Budget

A 60-minute voiceover can run you $900 when recorded internally, or $1,249 when using a voiceover agency. With a text-to-speech platform like WellSaid Labs, that 60-minute recording costs you a measly $11.76 in comparison. Even when you account for the employee’s time spent using WellSaid Labs, you’re tapping out at around $312—roughly one-third of the cost of internal productions and one-quarter of the cost of working with a voice agency.

So how can you use text-to-speech to reduce your eLearning product costs? Let’s discuss.

eBook Release: Text-To-Speech For L&D Pros: The Next Frontier Of Storytelling
eBook Release
Text-To-Speech For L&D Pros: The Next Frontier Of Storytelling
Learn how to create engaging online training experiences that grab learners' attention and foster an emotional connection.

4 Reasons Why Text-To-Speech Voiceovers Cut Costs

1. Audition As Much Talent As Quickly As Possible

One of the areas where L&D pros feel stuck before they even begin recording is in finding the right voice actor. It takes time to contact voice studios and receive samples from voice actors. You need to be able to audition as much talent as quickly as possible, while minimizing the back and forth spent on emails, outreach, and scheduling.

Instead of spending months in this process, text-to-speech enables you to audition dozens of voice actors within minutes, all from the convenience of your computer screen. (Gotta love the sound of that.) You don’t have to schedule meetings with voice avatars, wait for their people to get back to your people, and spend months tracking down the right voice. Cut that initial search down to a 30-minute session on your calendar and move on.

2. Test A Sample Before Investing In The Whole Production

Before you get ahead of yourself, even if you find a voice that you instinctively like, you want to make sure that it actually works when reading your script. Like it or not, there is a difference between how a voice sounds when selling laundry detergent and when articulating complex legal material.

Most voice production studios won’t just record snippets of your content before you’ve hired an actor and booked a recording studio. But that’s where text-to-speech is so powerful—you can input a snippet of your script and compare how your top avatars read it. Within minutes, you can confidently know which is the voice for you. Not only does this save you time, but it saves you costly fees from recording content with a voice actor, then realizing you need to re-record because it doesn’t sound the way you expected. (It’s also not a fun conversation to have with your boss.)

3. Minimize Time Spent Scheduling

Even if you can’t always easily attribute how much scheduling time adds up, there is a cost to spending your day doing that… versus all the other things you could work on. It takes time, effort, and money to book studio sessions, wait for final productions, listen to everything, re-record if necessary, and start the process over again.

But with text-to-speech, you don’t have to book rooms or even voice actors. You can simply produce when it’s convenient for you, wherever it’s convenient for you. You can do it when a window opens up in your schedule. You can do it on the weekend. You can do it on a plane. A train. A bus. An automobile. It’s deliriously convenient, giving you full control of when the recordings take place and when the final outputs are ready for video.

4. Maximize The Amount Of People Who Can Product At Once

Depending on the size of your organization or team, you may have several people involved in the production process, from writing to editing to recording to designing and beyond. Traditional recording methods aren’t scalable, in that only one person can record at once with the same voice. But with text-to-speech, you can have multiple people using your same brand avatar(s) without having to pay for additional studio time.

With text-to-speech, you can have an entire production team working on multiple scenes. You can scale your team to race ahead of deadlines, break projects into doable pieces, and have your voice avatars ready and at your service when you—or your entire team—are ready. Imagine the whole process working together like a symphony. An under-budget, ahead-of-schedule symphony.

Conclusion

Text-to-speech doesn’t just save you time—it saves you money, and lots of it. Text-to speech enables L&D teams to test multiple avatars in minutes, demo samples of their actual content before recording, minimize time spent scheduling, and maximize the amount of team members who can collaborate using the same voice and phonetic library. In this way, text-to-speech offers not just an easier voiceover process—but a more cost-efficient one, as well.

Download the eBook Text-To-Speech For L&D Pros: The Next Frontier Of Storytelling to learn how to maximize AI voice generation software for your remote learning teams and boost  engagement. It covers everything from cost reduction tips to engaging online learners with lifelike speech synthesis. Also, join the webinar to discover how to update eLearning voiceovers on time and under budget!