A headline to a post written by Backchannel Editor, Jessi Hempel, reads, “Voice is the Next Big Platform, and Alexa Will Own It.”
Hempel writes about the maturing of Amazon’s Echo in the coming years. How we’ll access information using our voice and not the keyboard, touch screen or other input devices we rely on now. Speak it, and it will come. Think Star Trek’s Computer on the Next Generation Enterprise, Theodore Twombly’s assistant Samantha in the motion picture Her, or the HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
It’s Not What You Say, it’s What You Hear
Part of the excitement of using voice input are the voice responses from the device. Retrieving requested information and executing tasks on demand is a natural extension of how we live with computers. The voice feedback should sound natural and genuinely human.
What We Have Now
If you own an iPhone, Siri responds when you utter a request. Asking Siri to do the same thing multiple times might give you a variety of verbal responses, but the intonation of the same response sounds the same from the first instance to the next. Changes in vocal texture are missing, and they’re what’s needed to make the experience more comfortable and life-like.
Could This Be the Next Big Thing for Voice Actors?
Imagine being booked to record thousands of phrases multiple times. Each time you repeated a phrase, it would contain unique vocal qualities. Then, intelligent AI programming, using natural language processing, would use your words to build responses on the fly. Voice stress, breathiness, pace, and volume would be part of the reply computation.
Maybe you would audition your voice from one company to another. Companies, like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, and others, could catalog voices and make choosing a specific one an option when buying a device like an iPhone or Echo.
You wouldn’t pay to have your voice hosted, but would receive a royalty payment whenever a client selects it as the voice for their new device. Perhaps in the future, there will be a need for a new type of agent who focuses only on voices for vocal response.
It’s Happening
Last year I was invited to record thousands of phrases for a cutting edge company working on delivering a unique voice to vocally challenged people. VocalID is transforming digital speech replacement with human vocal characteristics. Their charter is to bring speaking machines to life. They’re doing that by matching vocal efforts of people who don’t have the ability of speech with those who do and using special software to meld the two. The result is surprising.
What’s next?
Vocal banks may become a new opportunity for voice actors. More devices and situations for vocal feedback are coming. The companies working on AI and voice interfaces, like those mentioned above, will create more needs for vocal feedback and your voice may be part of their roster.
© 2017 J. Christopher Dunn
J. Christopher Dunn's Voiceover Blog 
Interesting stuff for sure. Thanks for the post.
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Hi Judy- I wonder, though, how human we want out digital assistants to sound. Will people warm up to something that sounds human but isn’t?
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Quite so. I want to know immediately whether I’m communicating with a thinking, emotional person or a chip so I can adjust my response. As with physical robots, it becomes more spooky the nearer a machine resembles a real human. Siri, Echo and the rest sound quite ‘human’ enough now, and reassuringly stupid!
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Shortly after I published this post, I came across an article on the news site QUARTZ about a product designer finding out that people react negatively when a robot shows a personality. https://qz.com/882258/a-product-design-expert-explains-why-injecting-personality-in-technology-makes-people-angry/ The test subjects just wanted the thing to carry out its task without any type of pseudo-human interaction. In time, attitudes will change as technology becomes more refined and the psychology of human and machine is understood better. I think we’re a long way off from a positronic brain and beings like Start Trek’s Data.
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When the “Data Like” robots start appearing, it won’t be long before “hobbyist protesters” (those who jump from cause to cause just because they enjoy being in a state of protest) will start attributing human rights to these devices simply because they seem human and are being treated like slaves. A whole new round of public disobedience will be instituted to secure their rights.
Like all recent tech advances, Society will experience growing pains like those with the Internet, Napster, net neutrality, and many other things. I may not be here to see it, but it would be cool if some of them were talking with my voice! hehehe!
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I smell a conspiracy.😉
Change is a scary thing and there are folks who would rather bathe in the days of their former glory than to consider adapting to change. I think it’s human nature to have even a slight aversion to change. Who likes to have their favorite SciFi TV show canceled (I’m talking to you SciFi Channel!!!) with no apparent reason? Who likes to walk into their favorite grocery store to find that it’s been mucked with and the isles no longer are where they should be (Oak Harbor Safeway, that’ed be you!)
Another part of being human is we have a brain that allows us to embrace change when necessary. Shall we take a stroll in the wayback machine and plant our butts happily in the era before the world got all techy? That seems to be a recurring theme in Hollywood and we still don’t know if Skynet is dead.
Oh, wow… talk about OT. Anyway… the day will come where our voices will be easily reproduced based on a vocal seed, for better or worse. I don’t think we’ll see a day where voiceover or narration is completely replaced by computers or bots. Unless those bots are Johnny 5 or CHAPPiE.
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