Dave Courvoisier's Blog

Remember just in the last week, I blogged twice about computer-generated voices in new technology devices now on the market?

Kindle-2 Text-to-Speech…the Future of Voice Acting?

Automated Voices

Today, Stephanie Ciccarelli of VOICES.com is taking notice too…and taking action.  See her appeal below (link just under my logo), and then make sure and click on the link at the bottom of her article, to MAKE YOUR HUMAN VOICE HEARD.

CourVO

1. Voiceover = A Human Voice Recording a Custom Performance... right?

Apple has just released their newest version of the iPod Shuffle and one of its new features is referred to as "voiceover", which as you can imagine piqued my interest, touting that the device can speak 14 languages. 

Deeper research into the matter revealed that no voice actors were actually hired to record for the iPod Shuffle, nor were any "voiceovers" recorded for the 3rd generation of the iPod Shuffle. The "voiceover" feature pulls phonemes and other sound bites (or bytes!) from the voice stored in your computer, and depending on which type you have (Mac or PC), a different voice will read out song titles, artist names and playlists.

One can assume that "Voiceover", by Apple's definition, means synthetic, computer generated voices, basically, text-to-speech (TTS).

Does this matter a great deal? Yes!

Due to the fact that Apple is a very large entity with a great web presence, the term "voiceover" could quickly become associated with Apple's "voiceover" feature, which as we have discovered, isn't voiceover, at least in the purist sense, at all.

Will we as an industry stand for this?

Have your say here:

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://blogs.voices.com%2Fvoxdaily%2F2009%2F03%2Fvoiceover.html