Text-To-Speech And Presentation Voiceover, What Is The Real Question?

What is the best option to publish the presentation I am working on?

Creating presentations is a core activity in many companies, including e-learning. Many presentations are designed to be used in a live situation, be it a conference, a meeting, a conference, or a webinar, but occasionally we may want to post and share presentations on the web.

In publishing such a presentation, we all must face a decision. Will we post only the images themselves (the "silence" alternative), grab a microphone and record our voice comments, write a script and hire a professional voiceover, or use text-to-speech?

_{6 tips for producing good quality audio narrations that every online educator should know}

When this option is discussed in various forums on the web, the discussion quickly turns into a debate on the very idea of ​​replacing the human voice with a computer generated voice, and whether TTS is good enough to replace human speakers. . What I find surprising is not the fact that there is a reaction when it comes to something to which we have an emotional attachment such as our voice, but the fact that we often do not see text to speech as another option available to us. (as much as silence, our own voice and a professional voice talent) when it comes to publishing a presentation, but we prefer to see text-to-speech as a substitute.

The question of whether we should replace the human voice with text-to-speech is the wrong question. The real question is, what's the best option to post this presentation I'm working on?

Let's go back to the choice we are facing as the author of the presentation. A silent presentation can be a valid and direct option if the presentation is self-explanatory and does not require any additional comment. Recording the voiceover on our own can be a valid option if we have time, a voice with sufficient quality for the task in question and the technical knowledge and tools necessary for the task. A voice talent can be a splendid alternative if we have the budget, time and logistics to select and obtain a professional voice talent to record a voice-over for our presentation.

But what are the conditions under which text-to-speech can be a suitable option, if not the best one?

Well, the obvious answer is that we may need text-to-speech when none of the other three options is available for one reason or another. But there are other more interesting situations, where text to speech is not only acceptable, but could even be our best option.

1. When working with presentations that need frequent updating, human voiceovers can be difficult or even impossible to use. When using text-to-speech, updating voiceover for a presentation is as easy as editing text.
2. When working on multilingual material, we may not have the budget and the logistical possibility of obtaining good speakers in all languages. With Text-to-speech we only need to translate our text into the target languages, which is a much easier task. We could even adopt a mixed solution (human voiceover for some languages, TTS for other languages).
3. When we need to be able to publish quickly and 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, text-to-speech is always available.
4. When we need to publish a large presentation library, text-to-speech will be able to work faster than in real time, which means that we can produce several hours of audio in just a few minutes.
5. When we want to use multiple voice characters in our presentation, the complexity and budget required for a voice-over project can take Hollywood proportions. With Text-to-Speech, using multiple voices is as easy as using just one voice.
6. Text-to-speech can also be used to build a prototype of a presentation, test the script, and how the images and words go together, before calling a professional voiceover for the final shot.

The state-of-the-art text-to-speech has improved voice expressiveness, is available in many languages ​​and with multiple voices available for each language, as you can hear in this sample voice presentation in English.

Slidetalk: we present 13 of our voices in English, for your speaking presentations

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The availability of many voices opens up the possibility of alternating different voices in the same presentation, which can help to increase audience participation. There are many other ways to improve the way TTS is used. As with any tool, we need to master its strengths and weaknesses to make the most of it.

The SlideTalk web service has been created to make adding text-to-speech voice-overs to presentations easy, by hiding all the technicalities and allowing us to focus on choosing images and writing descriptions, while everything else is handled automatically. The result is a YouTube video, easy to share. This is called showing, describing, sharing method. SlideTalk integrates high-quality text-to-speech in over 20 languages ​​and over 70 voices.

In conclusion, as eLearning professionals we need to build an arsenal of tools and the competition to choose which are the most appropriate for each project. When it comes to publishing online presentations, voice talents, home recording, voice-over text-to-speech, silent and self-explanatory images are tools at our disposal. We must learn to use each of them.

6 tips for producing good quality audio narrations that every online educator should know