David Ciccarelli on the Future of Voices.com using AI voices

A series of recent events sent the VO industry into a spin last week, culminating in voices.com revealing that it would be aggressively expanding into the area of AI voice, TTS or speech synthesis.

Many reports circulated that voices.com, due to a change in terms of service, were now able to train any voice model using demos, auditions and jobs uploaded to the platform.

I put the concerns of the VO community to the CEO of voices.com, David Ciccarelli - and these are his direct responses. This content is provided for information only, and for the purposes of fact-checking so that interested parties can make up their own minds.

Here is a transcript of the interview:

Toby Ricketts

This is VO life hosted by me Toby Ricketts. It's a podcast, which goes over all the things happening in the voice over world. We meet the people behind the voices, and the people behind the companies that employ the voices. And today we have a very special guest, David Ciccarelli from voices.com. Recently, we've had some controversial news that's come out about voices.com, which is in the area of AI. So welcome, David. Thanks for coming on the program and answering some questions today. Of

David Ciccarelli

course. Great to be here, Toby, you and I go way back. So happy to to chime in.

Toby Ricketts

Absolutely cool. I thought Firstly, I want to do a bit of a recap bit of a timeline about the history of AI voices. And I don't like calling them AI voices. And I've heard people say it's not AI voice it's nothing AI about it. All it is is text to speech or speech synthesis. But we will probably mention AI voices from time to time. So anyway, back in 1960s, IBM developed speech synthesis, you know, you got the Stephen Hawking voice, you can hear what it's saying, but it doesn't really sound like a human. Then in the 2010s we've got machine learning Alexa, Siri, Google come on the scene in 2014 11 and 16, respectively, they offer like dynamic speech so that you know the computer can generate some text and read what's on screen or read you know, commands etc. Then in 2020s, the voice models improve Google's taka Tron two comes out in 2017. And lots of sites launch using this as kind of a face plate and basically just using the API to generate speech and then selling it to the public. And this is the first idea that as voices as professional voices, there's some you know, there's this stuff doing a very bad job of what we're doing. But in the last two years, there's been huge investment into like, you know, in data purchase and mining for speech data on the internet, machine learning generative AI comes along, of course, Chet be GPT is the most recent edition of this in terms of like generating text and just getting hyper realistic passing the Turing test and really smashing through all those barriers that we thought would 10 years away. Then there's stuff in the in the visual field like Dali, mid journey, stable diffusion comes along, starts, you know, copying famous works of art, extending famous works of art as the most amazing thing where they can basically paint what the the original artists didn't. And, and now it's kind of crept this photo realism is kind of starting to creep into the world of professional voice. We've got things like 11 Labs back, we've even got people being replaced, like with AI, radio, and DJs. You know, effectively fake these, as you can't tell, are not human. Then suddenly, last week, all of this stuff happened. We had a new song released from one of your fellow countrymen, Drake, one of the famous most famous rappers in the world, except it wasn't Drake and the weekend, it was a song that was completely contrived using AI. X next. And a very interesting sort of sudden court battle ensued, which we'll get into a little bit in the interview, but it proved that there were holes in the copyright law when it came to copying people's voices with AI. There was a Wall Street Journal article that came out at the beginning of last week, which outlines how lots of voice of artists and a lot of the people I know and work with, how they're being stolen from, you know, old samples that have been hoovered up from around the internet, or previous jobs that they've done for clients, where the terms of service were changed, or something happened around that. A good friend of mine and host of The Pro Audio suite, Andrew Peters announced on his podcast the other week that he's been replaced by AI for one of his biggest gigs, which has been the voice of a network. I got interviewed late last week about about how my voice had been stolen. And I was suddenly like, has it and I looked into Yes, it had I've been I've been copied on the internet. And then right into the middle of this whole fray like all this is going on. And then the voices.com announces the purchase of voices.ai. And and you updated your terms of service. And this is where everyone the internet went crazy for a second, lots of fires were started, pitchforks were grabbed and charged with and there was lots of lots of robust debate, shall we say around the internet about what it meant? What does this mean for me as voiceover, there's lots of existential crises going on with with with people's voice and their careers because like, you know, many people rely on this for their, for their bread that brings them to their house. So it mostly centers and this is my first question and mostly centered around the terms of service of voices.com. And we've covered this before in other discussions, because I remember when it changed, and it was like, you know, we own the voice for whatever we want all around the world in every jurisdiction. And that was correct me if I'm wrong, but that was basically so you can transfer the ownership from the voice to you to the client, so you can therefore Chase pregnant. That's it in a nutshell, right?

David Ciccarelli

Yep. So if the client doesn't pay for any reason that we have some recourse to go after the client to say listen, you don't own it. We own it as a temporary kind of holding pattern. On behalf of the talent until you pay Yes. And then we dispersed the payment to the talent. So that was that was the background on that project.

Toby Ricketts

That's advice. I assume you've had lawyers have got involved, and also only these rights otherwise, we can't do our jobs. So but what people are saying is that that effectively does like it puts in writing that you can use it for all these purposes. And while VoiceOver is not in, like explicitly mentioned, it's not explicitly excluded, I guess. So my biggest question is, like, you've made statements basically saying, We will not use your voice for AI, we won't use demos, we won't use auditions and we won't use and the end clients are not allowed to use Final jobs. And this specifically stated that it's an AI job. Why can't you? You've said that in statements like blog posts, and you've said it, you know, on interviews, etc. But couldn't you incorporate that into the terms of service? Because that would put a lot of mine people's mind at ease?

David Ciccarelli

I you know, and the short answer is, yeah, we're going to, and I think that's what we've realized that it was maybe an omission, through, you know, realizing that the technology has kind of developed that quickly, that this is needed. And it's why we co create with the talent community. And so we have some terminology with the lawyers right now, I was hoping that I could get it, you know, if you will, approved prior to prior to our podcast, but I'm happy to kind of read it out, because I think it's the section here, that would be most helpful that it does, quote, does not permit voices to make or trained derivative works. And then might be asking, well, what's the derivative work, such as synthetic voices, or more commonly known as AI voices of any user generated content without the express consent of said user, ie the talent? And so that's, that's what we have, I think it was just, it's really just the call out because derivative works. You know, it could be a cut down or an edit or something. That's how I think initially, we're thinking of derivative works not to create a whole synthetic voice. So that's what's that's what's kind of in queue right now. Yeah, there's, I mean, we've never created an AI voice. From, you know, from a from a demo, from an audition and the finished product, it's owned by the client, if the clients paid for it, that's their ownership at that point. And nor do we have any plans to so this wasn't, this wasn't a difficult decision to make. It was, as I say, perhaps, an oversight and omission, mostly because we didn't recognize the speed of the in the development of the technology. And if there's concern that we're doing this, I'd rather dispel the concern and put it put it in writing. And I appreciate that I can, I can make pledges and statements, but it's, it's really the legally binding agreement, which the community wants and happy to oblige.

Toby Ricketts

Okay, cool. Does that also cover the fact that if I, you know, say, I do a, you know, a three page elearning, for for Microsoft, that then they own those files, once they've, once they've paid for it, and they have this files in their position, it's very easy for them to train something like a living labs on that on just, you know, three minutes or 10 minutes of audio, and to sound like my voice does anything in the terms of service prevent clients currently from using it for a different purpose than was hired for?

David Ciccarelli

It does similarly, how, and I'd have to kind of dig up the exact kind of section number, if you will. But certainly the intent is just like if you're going to have it for an audiobook, and that's presumably hours long, it's for an audiobook. It's not meant to train another system. And maybe in a more kind of practical use, you said, it's for a radio commercial, you don't get to transpose that and put it into an online audio ad and upload it to Spotify, and get, you know, a million listens that way. So this really does come down to the honor system of the client saying this is how I'm going to use it. Our responsibility is to ask the right questions, and capture what they're saying, in terms of usage, and ensuring that we communicate that through this system to the talent and let the talent decide. Yep, that's acceptable in terms of the use and the price. That's what I'm agreeing to. And yet, I think we can go a step further. And so next week, you know, there's there's a lot of these licenses that have been established. I've granted permission for my voice to be used for this medium for the next time period, 13 weeks or a year. And yet there isn't, you know, a log, if you will, a system and we move asked talent, how do you keep track of all that usage? And there's a phrase in the industry that the real money is made on the back end, it's not actually the initial particularly in broadcast work. It's not necessarily the initial creation. It's the ongoing usage of that for real successful campaigns that might go on for multiple years. And so we wanted to build a in what we're launching next week is a license management system, where the client To be able to see all the licenses that they've purchased. When it comes up for renewal, we'd ask them, I think it's like 30 days in advance. Are you still using this? Do you plan on using it? If so, would you like to renew your license? And then there's a request for quote, and so that they can ask the talent, hey, what would it cost to renew this license for, you know, and they can extend the time period. Or they can extend again, modified, perhaps the jurisdiction of the media, if you will. So it is a request for quote, but it's, it doesn't require an audition, and it doesn't require the delivery of another file. But that at least creates the system for that kind of ongoing usage, to be, you know, managed and monitor over

Toby Ricketts

time license extension. Exactly. It'd be lovely to see some kind of collaboration with eyespot. TV or one of the media monitoring platforms as well, so that it can actually, you know, because I know many people who found work that are still playing that should absolutely, so that's, that's exciting progress. I'm just going back to the Terms of Service, again, in terms of what because many people were, they were like, it happened on the same day announcing the AI voices and then changing the terms of service. And of course, someone who's, who's a bit worried about the career anyway, will leap to the conclusion that you change Terms of Service, so that you can enable you to train voice models for whatever, whatever, you've gone on the record saying that that obviously didn't happen. It was a kind of a minor change. I think they happen on the 24th do want to just outline people who, who didn't see the explanation for that.

David Ciccarelli

Sure. No, thanks. Thanks, Toby. The change on to the Terms of Service last week actually related to we've removed something from the terms of service, which related to language around the categories that we, you know, moved into, you know, we've always we've been doing for voiceover for more than 15 years, a couple years ago, we thought, Oh, well, you know, audio production is a natural extension, maybe music composition, or kind of custom music. And then translation, often scripts need to translate from English to French and Spanish and so forth. And so why don't we enable these additional creative services on voices.com, then we had lots of, you know, service providers, other talent in those other creative categories. But really getting the clients to think to go to voices.com. First for translation was a real struggle, even though they had, you know, maybe done some work with us in the past. So that was

Toby Ricketts

an experiment that you launched them didn't really work,

David Ciccarelli

exactly, we looked at, and I think we're a niche player and, and really excel at that. And I think that's something that we're recognizing, and so we should, you know, in all likelihood, embrace the strength of being a leader in voice. And you're right, it candidly didn't work as, as anticipated. So we thought, why maintain these because every, every new feature and iteration, we talked about whether it's licensing, or, you know, searching the search engine, we always have to ask, Well, how do we do that for translation? How do we do it for music, and it just slowed us down? Okay, so we decided to wind it down, remove the language, you're right. Coincidentally, had these are two completely unrelated items. Now, when we make a change to the Terms of Service, there's, there's three levels, okay. One is this fundamentally changes the nature of the agreement, the spirit of the agreement, if you will, between voices, and the clients or the talent, in which case, and that could be around pricing change, you know, cancellation clause refund policy, these kind of big pieces. And in that case, you've probably experienced on some sites, you'll land and it requires you to click or accept the agreement before you even continue. So one, this was far from that this was kind of saying this didn't work, we've removed this language, one level below that would say, Okay, we're going to inform you that something changed. And we'll describe kind of what it is. But in this situation, you know, and that's kind of like an email goes out, and people are informed. But you don't need to click to accept it just kind of breeze breeze through the lowest level would be it could be everything from a typo, to, you know, removing something innocuous that we're just not doing anymore, or a change of address or something that just needs to be a, you know, an update. Still, we go through that goes through kind of a, you know, a past with the lawyers internally and externally. And then we publish the new terms of service and archive, I think, which is above the standard of care archive, the previous version. So that's, that was really the level of change. In this in this Terms of Service, the sections that have been mentioned, they've actually been in there for over two years. So it's not like we added this new section. At that time. It's been there for two years.

Toby Ricketts

We did an interview on it at the time, actually, which I'll link in this video to prove that that's the case. Yeah, it's been a while the other kind of couple of legal questions while we're on the legal side. Which does hear where this exists is like, When will this new wording be added to the Terms of Service? People want to know that? Yeah, I

David Ciccarelli

listen if I could have it happened today? I certainly would. I mean, it went to them on Thursday, which was the April 28 or so. It's usually a week turnaround. It sounds you know, innocuous, just to add a couple words of like, trying to be more specific. But, you know, you know, the fact that we're even having this conversation shows that every word matters. And so just want to make sure that we've, we've gone through the process there. But because this is the commitment in saying, we're not going to do something this would, you know, be at that level of, of sending out an email, informing the community and describing in that email, Hey, here's, here's what changed. And here's, here's what's new and different as of this date.

Toby Ricketts

Okay, cool. And on the low question as well, someone brought up on one of the forums that, that you're based in Canada, and it's Canadian law, which governs your your terms of service, and which, which doesn't have any statutory performance rights provisions like in the US, and produces utilize work for hire doctrine there. And apparently isn't much so that we can do about it. This is this is the problem that's being seen around the world in various jurisdictions where, like, for example, that the Drake video where they found that they there wasn't actually any law to be able to prosecute this person, because then they've done anything wrong, according to the law. So is there is it something you've thought about in terms of like, is it always going to be governed by Canadian law where there's not as strong a copyright provisions in California law, for example? Like, how does that implement your your terms of service and your business model? Do you think we can sort of get what power clients have in this new AI world?

David Ciccarelli

I don't think it weakens it. I mean, we, as a Canadian entity, we do, you know, abide by Canadian law. The the new site, which again, we're really just standing up, is not another legal entity. voices.ai is really just a website at this point. It's not it's not a distinct legal entity. So it certainly would fall within Canadian law. And, you know, in the in the United States, the actual jurisdiction where most of the corporate work where a company maintains its corporate headquarters or entity is actually in Delaware, because there's so much precedent for case law in Delaware. So each state might operate differently. But if it's, you know, it Delaware has like the history and there's something unique about that space, it's not a very populous state at all,

Toby Ricketts

I had a podcast about that the other day about how it is like, it's all of the corporate laws are written by corporate lawyers. And literally, it's like, entirely closed off process. So it's basically like, you can do whatever you want in Delaware.

David Ciccarelli

That's, and that's where you if you were to incorporate a new business, it almost defaults to being in Delaware. Yeah, that's where you're Incorporated. You can operate really anywhere with with your office. But we're Canadian company. We've not viewed this as a hindrance in the past, and certainly hope not in the future, either.

Toby Ricketts

Okay, cool. That's so good. I guess just to round off that decision about because still people will have an issue with, you know, the terms of service that have been enforced for two years saying, you know, we can we can use, we can use this for whatever we want. There's Do you see there is any other way around that in terms of like being able to be the intermediary between voices and clients, you will always need that permission, if just expressly for the purposes of completing a commercial transaction? Is that your your official view? And there's there's sort of no other way? Because that does put a lot of people off, even though it's probably on other sites to be honest.

David Ciccarelli

Yeah, I mean, we've, I guess, in the absence of that, we it really doesn't give us any teeth to go after the clients, like how are we engaging the clients? I mean, I think the key difference is that we run a transactional platform, the money and the files are delivered through voices.com. Most from the best of my knowledge, most other voice kind of casting sites, really act is purely the matchmaker and say, Okay, go off to PayPal to figure out payment and send files by Dropbox or upload them to Google Drive. They're not handling the end to end. And so because we are, which is actually our patent that we hold in the US and Canada, which you know, we pervert, I guess properly referred to as sharpei. But there's a patent that's held on that. It really does require us to have that kind of end to end kind of coverage. And why which is why the language is a lot stronger there because we're facility transaction from the get go right through file from payment and file delivery as well.

Toby Ricketts

Interesting. It'll be interesting. If was 123 has changed, because they had been now, you know, trying to get as many talent through their platform on their, you know, them organizing the payment sites or their terms of service have changed. But I get back to our main topic. So voices.ai, you bought voices.ai? Was Was this? Was it just a name? Because, you know, I went to the site expecting demos like on speech alone there. I mean, there are 1001 ai voice sites now, because everyone wants to be the new, you know, center of artificial voice. But I was kind of disappointed in terms of it had lots of lots of statements like all the others and pictures, but you couldn't press play anywhere and hear the results, you could sign up for updates. Was it basically just a park domain that you bought? Or did you buy any technology along with that? Or any kind of data sets or anything like that?

David Ciccarelli

Yeah, no, I'm glad you brought that up. Because it was it was, it was really just a domain. Originally, it was just purely to be a defensive move. I mean, I wanted to acquire the domain, so that it didn't get into the wrong hands, ie a competitor, or maybe a new startup causes all kinds of confusion of, you know, hey, is this the site kind of looks and feels like you, there's actually even some quite some sites nowadays that are that are just voices, and then some something else, and people think that it's us. And so that I kind of saw that playing out. And I was like, well, maybe we should, you know, acquire this name, as the kind of ideal, I did what most people do, you just type it into the browser at the time, it was just simply a parked domain, which, which for those who are unfamiliar with this term of park domain, it means a website that is just hosted by the registrar, it's kind of a placeholder page, and it says, you know, website coming soon, something like that, and some contact information for the registrar, there was no, there was no site on it, there was no company or technology. In so after speaking with clients, though, you know, being someone I try to connect the dots on this type of thing, we've actually identified a new type of customer, which is that of the software developer, you know, on voices.com, mostly, it's creative producers, it's video producers, it's brand managers, marketing agencies, and, of course, small business owners as well, too. But this new persona, if you will, is that of the software developer, and these are people who were wanting to incorporate, you know, a synthetic voice into their product. And maybe it's for, you know, content that changes all the time. And therefore, you know, it's kind of a two way conversational assistant, or a chatbot. And so realizing and kind of identifying this new, you know, this new use case, if you will, and this new persona. At the same time, we were scheduled to attend an upcoming conference, on this very topic. I just felt, hey, why don't we soft launched this website, with this vision of actually creating a voice development platform. So a development platform is, you know, it's not really for the creative producer. It's somewhere where you get code snippets and documentation, and yes, through through code, you can access these type of AI generated voices. So if you go to, you know, Amazon Pali would be something for people to Google. It's the same type of voice development platform by Microsoft as yours manifest the same sort of thing. Exactly. Yeah. And so IP is basically it's really a tool set developers to create applications and seeing that, you know, chat right now, and is very popular, but it's really just tax base, that next evolution is going to be conversational, two way. And it's going to be voice based. And so I, you know, really just spotting an opportunity. So that's what this this site is there's you're right, there's no samples that you can play. It's really a join a waitlist, but we've been actually reaching out to those that have signed up and just said, Hey, what brought you to the site? Thanks for joining the waitlist, what is it that you're looking to build, because maybe we can help you sooner than later or when we co create with you, let's make sure that we're building the right thing. So there's 100 software developers on the list, and in certainly growing by a few every day, and you know, the future we're going to build with them as well, too.

Toby Ricketts

So you don't want to miss out on that. Because it's, it's clear that this is the direction that the world currently is heading in in terms of like heading voices. And you know, no one wants to miss that that piece of the pie, because we can see that it is going to be a big part. And I mean, we've been seeing it as voice artists for years, but didn't expect it to get this good this quickly. I mean, you'll be dragged into all of the debate that's raging at the moment, which is like it's large in the voice of Stockholm. It's mainly about copyright law. The Drake thing that I talked about earlier with the rapper, who you know released the song that he didn't actually sing at all, like they just sampled his voice, wrote a song and then wrapped it and then had their voice put over the top of it. And it highlighted all these these really interesting issues around copyright and the fact that like, No Copyright Act currently covers synthetic performances, just distributing copies of recordings. And so since AI voice recording is not a performance, given by the person who holds the copyright, it's a new, it's a new work independent. And so like lots of people are saying, well, this is, you know, the service. This basically allows people once they've got your voice likeness, as long as you're not performing it, and it's an AI performing it, then it's, it's, you know, the copyright belongs to the person who created the file so that in what ways I mean, this has been outside of the I don't know maybe what you've prepared for, but like, Have you identified ways to be a part of that debate? It's important now that we try and find a way that's equitable for voices to go forward and try and make some kind of living off off the synthetic voices they create. And you're going to be a big part of that, that discussion, given that you've got probably the one of the world's largest voice data sets, although you said you won't use it for for AI training? What are your thoughts around around? What's going to happen with copyrights? And how voices can keep control of their their voice?

David Ciccarelli

Yeah, well, to the best of my understanding, you really can't use someone's image or likeness, in for commercial purposes. Now that might be the difference is that that musical piece was done as almost like fan, a fan piece, it wasn't meant to generate revenue. Just like you can't take a picture of a celebrity, and then use it in an advertisement, right, without their permission, because you're using their image or likeness. Now, this is why we're gonna say quite sensitive about this, when a client would ask for a sound alike, like, are you doing an impression of someone? Or are you trying to impersonate them, because if you're impersonating you are really trying to be that image and likeness of that talent. Classic example is James Earl Jones. People would say like, I want you to sound like James Earl Jones. So are you putting it off as being them? That's who you hired? Or is it an impression, where it's more satirical, if you will, in its in its performance? It's so I think there is a fine line. However, you know, the law clearly needs to be updated to handle this, but probably that distinction is if it's for commercial commercial purposes, on voices in particular. You know, how can we maybe prevent I think, is it might be where, what you're alluding to, like, prevent the misuse of, perhaps someone's cloned voice. You know, a couple things right now, we don't allow clients to, you know, download the auditions, or sorry, the demos, you know, it's really hard to extract, you know, you can't just go in and like, go to Google Images and get every image that's available. Or some of these sites where you can like download on mass. We, if we see kind of like, bought like activity, we're going to put, you know, we have firewalls, we're putting up blocks, it's quickly. So these are kind of preventative.

Toby Ricketts

Just just just just to expand that theory, there was a debate a long time ago, and it still kind of goes on a bit about watermarking. Because you know, and I was shied away from watermarking, because, you know, you'd only read, you know, most of the scripts or whatever, not include the brand name or something. And that would be that would prevent them from using it effectively. But now that we're talking about the actual likeness of a voice, is I mean, if everywhere, if every demo had a slight watermark in it, it would be quite useful because then someone couldn't just go and like write a script that would go and harvest every sample of a page. For example,

David Ciccarelli

I've heard that on. Audio Jungle has this little whisper audio chuckles from whisper in the background, a lot of sites do that. If you recall, I actually think it was voice 123 A couple years ago did that and clients were just, you know, talent, were like, you're, you're deteriorating or degrading my voice, I want this demo. And clients in the audition were like, this is kind of useless, you know, like they might want to play with at a team meeting or a collaborative session when they're making those decisions. So you know, I've witnessed this a few times. We've contemplated that for, like for auditions, it's just becomes incredibly distracting. I think most clients have good intention of they're going to use this audition so they can make a decision and ultimately hire a talent about it. So I'm not sure and when it comes to an AI generated voice, this is something else really important, I think for the community to know and understand. The highest fidelity that this can be done right now is 22 kilohertz, which is kind of half the quote unquote broadcast quality. So I am having a hard time believing that big brand out there who's going to spend millions of dollars on airtime and media buy is going to use a degraded low fidelity. I mean, it would be like, you know, audio file it'd be like seeing a billboard with it's all pixelated or like a watermark on on it.

Toby Ricketts

So I think the content is more than that. It'll be used for the long tail audio like, like like audiobooks, you know, elearning industrials, basically industrials is where is where it's at, in terms of this new voice technology, because that doesn't really require the acting and the quality level, most of its watched on YouTube on phones. So really, like the quality is not as much of a barrier as I thought, I feel like commercial, and commercials will be safe for some time yet.

David Ciccarelli

I would agree with that

Toby Ricketts

it's the train, it's kind of the training grounds of voice over the, the stuff that you do, when you're you first start out that is, seems to be mostly in jeopardy. And for that quality doesn't matter as much. Because that used to be my argument was just like, you know, the speech synthesis models, they only sample at, you know, 2205 hertz. So, it's, it sounds to me as an audio engineer, like, it's not very good quality, but I think people watching on their phones and on YouTube videos just don't don't even perceive that. Right, quality is really amazed at how quality is dropped. For even for things like commercials, sometimes when people are recording stuff on their phones, or through the Blue Yeti mic or, you know, and and it's kind of deemed acceptable. Now, we're absolutely wouldn't have been five years ago. Yeah, so that is a bit of a problem, you know, in terms of people that the bar to, to acceptable audio is much lower than it was I think, even with with regard to the performance, because you do hear some YouTube videos that are clearly AI voice generated quite badly. And yet, it says hundreds and 1000s of them. So

David Ciccarelli

yeah, I mean, the genres, if you will, that I would almost describe as like, the applications or the uses, where, you know, voiceover might be impacted, or kind of is like might tend towards an AI voice. And I know, we're using that term kind of interchangeably with synthetic voice as well, too. But I would look at the spectrum of like informational versus emotional. And if it's just pure information, like turn by turn directions, the elevator, the parking garage, the airport announcements, I mean, it's very, basically public service announcements. Or, it's, as you describe this kind of corporate training material, where the person in the curriculum departments, you know, and human within human resources, and they're the curriculum designer, I mean, their mandate is to make the content accessible to the most people possible in that organization. So that there's a new compliance or safety video that's being produced, then they need to make it available in five different languages. And the whole thing does needs to be, you know, so that people of all walks of life, whether you have a and perhaps even disabilities can access that content in a lot of ways. It's purely an accessibility play that is being done here. And they don't unfortunately, have a lot of budget for it. And so the tendency can be that it's 100,000 words, and we're just going to have the generated text to speech voice, do this, rather than it gets in sometimes it's not even economically feasible for the talent who's going to who's going to do 100,000 words, for a few 100 bucks, no one is going to bother. So they're in a bit of a conundrum themselves to abide by accessibility, whether it's a law or a mandate within their organization, but then aren't given the appropriate budget. So how do they make those to fit? But basically, it's informational content. That can often be very high word count. Or on the other end of the spectrum, very low word count. Still informational. But it's, it's five or six words, it's almost, and I hope this comes out the right way. But it's such a short shelf life that the content has, you know, it's a one time social media video that, you know, once you've seen it in the feed, you don't want to see that again. I've seen and heard that video before. vapor? Well, exactly. And a lot of a lot of clients are like, producing 10 different variations of that video to see which one sticks, right, different calls to action, different script even. And how do we do this at scale? There's one advertiser that actually produced 2000 They hired a talent to do this 2000 variations of an ad. And it could it was different price points. 495 496-490-7595, five different calls to action Sign up today get started today. And then language depending on the device and the location that was used. It was all this, this whole matrix of all these different combinations,

Toby Ricketts

dynamic ads, I think they call those now is probably the way there is I think as well like they had so they kind of construct them on the fly, which is a very you know, it's an Interesting new form of media. And that kind of combines, like, kind of it's gotten outside the realms of advertising. It's more market research now isn't that amazing? So

David Ciccarelli

you just and marketing, the phrase of her recently is marketing is math, you know, people are going to create all of these assets, they're going to figure out through the numbers, which one works the best with the most about people, and then run with that. It's not just, it's not merely a creative decision, we're going to create variations, and then pick the winner, so to speak.

Toby Ricketts

Cool. Again, like with this new, you know, building voice models, so you've kind of gone out and said, You're going to be creating voice models, this is with individuals on on the voices.com platform. So you're not talking about kind of creating faceless models that are generated sort of out of thin air or out of out of large data sets, you're talking about specific voice models that people will own, still on your platform, and then you'll be the licensing agent for that, is that correct? Almost like a reseller,

David Ciccarelli

right, it's still your voice, but we are reselling that voice on your behalf. So I think this is how we're going to do this differently than maybe as you describe kind of the dozens of other startups that are that are out there. They're trying to aggregate data to create an anonymous, I refer to them as the mash up voices, it's like five different voices all at the same time, you can't really tell who it is, there's no attribution back to the talent. So if you really wanted to work with them for the big national campaign, you couldn't, because you don't know who it is. So how we can do this differently is that inviting to start 10 men and 10 women to have their voices cloned on voices.com. And it's done by professional voice actors. That way, the client can always hire, you know, the natural professional voice actor. But if they have some of these situations, what we're hearing of like, scratch tracks, it's a spec read, or just trying to get a sense of the video timing, these type of situations, or it's a test campaign, and before we go invest in the bigger national or deploy the big media spend, let's just see if we can get some quick feedback from the market, if you will, kind of that market research idea. So I don't So in those situations, you you hire the clone. Now the ideal state is you start with the clone and kind of it's it's almost like an upsell to the professional. But some maybe it maybe they're just realized up that ad campaign didn't work. No, I would rather have that client, start that journey@voices.com and be able to kind of reuse the term upgrade to working with with the Pro, rather than going to two or three different sites and trying to, you know, figure all that out. So I think there's a number of between the kind of like that, that spec test work. And then this dynamic nature of content, I think those are two real promising kind of new forms of media that previously are the types of jobs that weren't coming to voices.

Toby Ricketts

So just for clarity, because at the beginning that you said 10 Men 10 Women are going to have their voices sampled, it sounded like you were gonna put all those together to make a clone, but you're talking about 10 separate clones, male and female, and they would read and people will want to know this, that the people whose voices are sampled are free at any time to stop using that, and you won't own that they still have ownership of their Yeah,

David Ciccarelli

that's correct. I mean, there's, I mean, again, there's what's in it for us to say, No, you must stay on the website, we're gonna continue to use this, I just think it breaks, you know, trust in violation of everything that we're trying to achieve, which is if you want to participate, here's a new and different opportunity. If for some reason it doesn't work out, pricing or timing, or for whatever reason is, like, Great, we'll just, let's call it, you know, turn off that service and availability on your profile. So, you know, easy, you know, no harm, no foul, easy way to, to take the exit on that one.

Toby Ricketts

So just wrapping up, because I know we've taken a lot of your time today and thank you for for answering the questions. Like, like, Why do you think I'm, I'm always surprises that you guys sort of make a change. And then suddenly, everyone just like goes crazy, is what is it about voices.com that people just seem to get so mad about I know that sort of there's there's a bit of history where things didn't go right in the past, you've addressed it and I feel like you know, you've you've you've fairly addressed that. Is it just that people won't like, like, once the trust is broken, they'll never trust you again, or what's your sort of strategy for trying to make people feel better about the platform?

David Ciccarelli

You know, this this, it's really challenging because we often do things first. And when you do things First, there's unknowns because there's no precedent, right? There's not someone who's done this, you know, five times or you know, and in which case, those who are gonna say, the best I can do is communicate, be here on podcasts and interviews and videos, maintain a blog, let people know what we're up to. But there's actually a few venues that maybe others are unaware of, you know, I certainly don't operate in isolation. First and foremost, we have a great board of directors, who all of these type of decisions are run by that include a couple of independent board members, as well as our investors in so they're, you know, our intentions and incentives are aligned to make sure we're doing right by the business as well as the customers in which we serve. I also, you know, consult, if you will, with a CEO advisory group. So these are 20 voice actors, that from time to time, I'll preview ideas to say, hey, directionally, this is where we're gonna go. Or this is a decision we haven't made yet, but I wanted to bounce it off you. And those are one on one sessions that are held. And in addition to that, I've been hosting a number of what I call voices local, which are really just private events, you know, if I'm in a city or traveling to meet with clients, or again, at a board meeting, you know, gather people around for dinner, and we can go deep, these often go for three, four or five hours at a time. And, you know, there's, there's, there's nothing, you know, nothing off limits. It's a you know, and there's also no agenda for the evening. So anything goes often it's, it's definitely talking shot the whole night, and I try to answer questions, and maybe provide some clarity where possible. And that's really been, I feel, Toby, it's actually been quite helpful in the last couple of years, since putting in a real effort to be seen, and hopefully be heard. So, you know, yet another commitment is to continue up with those practices, because I do think they're making a difference.

Toby Ricketts

Cool. But David says early toward coming to a city near you. One final question, will there always be a place for human voices who own their own voices on your platforms, and you won't, you know, exploit them as it were, like,

David Ciccarelli

Oh, my goodness, I think this I think, the futures people because people buy and, and like to engage with other people, that we dragged some research around, like, well, what are the most popular voices, and it ended up being that people like to, you know, in terms of advertisements, like to buy from people who sound like them, which makes perfect sense, right? It's whether it's demographically or geographically in so that he's just going to need, you know, the human elements. There's things that are very difficult to replicate, if you will, like, and I know, we just say emotion is a bit of a catch all. But there's a lot that's, that can be unpacked there. Things like timing or comedic timing, or pause, what's the right amount of pause that it sounds natural, or even just a breath? You know, I think we tend to edit a lot of breath. So sometimes you need the breath or the sigh. And so I think there's absolutely a place for human voices on voices.com, it's likely going to be probably 99% of the activity for for quite a while because clients say yet well, I've looked at it, I've tried it, I can see some situations here and there. And maybe they get started with it. But I think there's continues to be a bright future for talent for years to come.

Toby Ricketts

Fantastic. Well, thank you very much for representing today and talking about the controversy. And I think we we got, you know, we've got through a good chunk of stuff there anything else that that you feel like people should know about your your current moves?

David Ciccarelli

No. Well, I think if anything, know that this, you know, we have good intent, we are here in in collaboration with the community. It might be cliche, but I've said this many times, our business truly is based upon shared success with the talent. When you thrive, that's when we do which is why we create the content, which is why we bring in the clients. So we were enthused, and we want to continue to work collaboratively with the community.

Toby Ricketts

And if people disagree with that, and think that those aren't your intentions, is there a way for them to get in touch? Like, what's the best way to actually

David Ciccarelli

I would love nothing more than people to send me an email, my personal emails, david@voices.com, it's pretty easy one to remember. And no matter how you feel, or what you're thinking, or you see something or hear something that doesn't sound quite right, I would welcome that, because that actually opens up the dialogue. What is what is heartbreaking is the assumptions that kind of lead to you know, and that are that are not really based upon fact, or reality, or assume kind of the worst, that becomes very challenging to navigate. And there's nothing more that I'd love than just to open a dialogue and let me hear the other side. And maybe it's an opportunity for us to improve or minimally course correct. So I would encourage that if you don't, if you don't feel that way, simply send me an email. Let's have a conversation.

Toby Ricketts

And I mean, it's true. I've sent you a number of jobs. where I've been like, Oh, this looks really dodgy. This is not a good look and you've looked into it and you've either stopped it or you've explained the situation and it has it is a good dialogue and like there was a there was a job about this AI stuff that we didn't get into on this time. But you know, it's yeah, if you have any concerns, then then email David and you must get a lot of email though. That email address

David Ciccarelli

I do. It's it's a little it's a little scary, but I chip away at it. I spend a lot of time just chipping away at but so please extend some patience and some grace but I'll get you an answer.

Toby Ricketts

Dave. It's it's really CEO of voices.com Thank you for fronting today and appearing here on vo life we will be sure to be in touch. If there's any other questions that the community wants answered.

David Ciccarelli

You got it thanks, Toby.

Interview with Hugh Edwards on Voicing for Videogames and TTS

Hugh Edwards is a big fish in the world of voiceover. Having cast hundreds of top game titles, and beings an Emmy judge, AND being the CEO of the world largest Voiceover career platform - Gravy for the Brain - makes him the go to for any current voiceover knowledge. In this interview originally recorded at Christmas 2022, Hugh and Toby Discuss the following:

0:00:00 Intro
0:01:45 Hugh’s history in Acting
0:04:54 When is it ok to do voiceover for free?
0:07:10 How did you get into the world of voiceover?
0:13:40 Career path is an evolution, rather than an absolute
0:15:45 What are some of the biggest titles you’ve worked on?
0:20:08 What a VO needs to do to get into voicing videogame characters
0:23:30 Why is voiceover in games not very well paid?
0:31:11 You’ve been involved in directing Text-to-Speech (TTS) since the beginning, tell us about this journey
0:38:20 What are some of the challenges around AI / TTS voice
0:46:12 Diversity within voice casting for games
0:47:50 What’s some advice for people auditioning for TTS work?
0:50:53 Where did the name Gravy for the Brain come from?
0:53:48 What has been the thing you’ve most enjoyed about 2022?
1:00:42 Is it better to be a voice artist today or 20 years ago?
1:04:20 What’s planned for Xmas?
Find out more about Gravy for the Brain at http://oceania.gravyforthebrain.com

Here is a transcript of the interview:

Toby Ricketts

Welcome to vo live brought to you by gravy for the brain Oceania today, we've got a special guest here. Well, they're always special guests on and let's be honest. It's we as you know, we have like the movers and shakers of the voice world, people are big in the world of voiceover. And last year, I had a wonderful Peter Dixon on for a fireside chat. And I thought, well, it's only right really to to invite his co conspirator on I'm Hugh Edwards, who is of course CEO of gravy for the brain worldwide. welcome you.

Hugh Edwards

All right. Thank you for just placing me in rank a year behind Peter.

Toby Ricketts

I love Exactly. Yeah, there you go.

Hugh Edwards

I know. I know where I'm where I'm supposed to be place, Toby.

Toby Ricketts

It's fine. Exactly. And actually, I nearly forgot, but I didn't quite that. I drank whiskey on that on that show. So I can I can toast you and get slightly drunker as the interview goes on, as we did last year, but there's probably not any whiskey in the in the office where you are. And you know, it's it's 9am it's. So if you were drinking, it would probably be a problem. But

Hugh Edwards

I've got I've got myself a nice coffee, and hello to all of the audience. Thanks for joining us. Cool. So

Toby Ricketts

like lots of ground to cover today in terms of like we want to find out about Hugh Edwards where you've come from all about your kind of how you found the voiceover world and sort of what you've what you've learned from it and what you've done within it. Covering because you like from the the bit of IMDb stalking that I've been doing it introduce you as an actor, producer and voice director and casting director and at the act a bit surprised me Have you acted?

Hugh Edwards

I have actored

Toby Ricketts

what? Well,

Hugh Edwards

so let me see. I've done seven films, I think. And I've been in probably a couple of 100 computer games. But that was mainly because with the computer games, I ended up there was always a few lines that the games company missed. And so rather than just go and hire someone for it, it's like fine, I'll just go and do it. And then they've got you know, a little bit more and more. But I always tended to try and not cast myself because a tiny bit unethical, isn't it? A little bit? Yeah, a little bit. But it was just when there was when there were things that needed filling. So I just run in and do them. So lots and lots of little tiny snippets of games. And yeah, a few films, mainly budget on actual speaking parts. I've been killed a lot of ways. I've been, I've been mauled to death. I have been eaten by a werewolf, zombie or gets ripped out by zombies. I've been chained sawed in half. That was a really good onscreen effect, actually. Yeah. And I was just sort of like hanging there. With no torso. It's quite funny. I would imagine a lot of my enemies like to watching that.

Toby Ricketts

Gosh, this is a site that I completely didn't know it existed so that the challenge for everyone is to go and find these independent zombie films that that start you out. It's being being cut up. So yeah, answers on a postcard, please.

Hugh Edwards

Well, funnily enough, the very first film that I ever did, was a film called Little Big Men. And it was a film as a kid's film. And the idea was, you had these four gangsters, adult gangsters and they stole this massive diamond. And they got caught by the karma police and shrunk into kids. And the kids that the trick was with the shows that the kids retained their adult voices. So it was like one massive ADR gig. And I was one of the characters in that. And I was kind of producing that as well, at the end of it. I mean, talk about low budget, this was really low budget. And at the end of it, we've completely run out of money. We've spent it all on catering, I think, and and I called up my friend, Neil Gardner, who's an audio producer in the UK. And I said, Neil, we need a voiceover and he said, Well, there's always Dixon, and he'll sort of say anything. So I call that this chap who I didn't know called Peter Dixon. And this was in the middle of his X Factor career like 2004. I think it was 2005. And I mean, Peter was big news. You know, he was a household name here. And he said, Yes, I'd love to do it. I said, there's no money. And he said, no worries. And so he just came down. In fact, he actually paid to do it because he paid his own petrol down to the studio. So he came was in this little tiny thing. And then I think a month later, I was doing a game for National Geographic. And so I gave the part to Peter as a sort of, by way of thanks, you know, and, you know, a couple of liquid lunches after that, and that's how we became friends.

Toby Ricketts

Yeah, gosh, how interesting and thus GFT be which was born but we're getting ahead of ourselves. So it's kind of, I guess one of those lessons in voiceover that like we always bang on about charge what you're worth, you know, don't do good. Do the race for them. Um, but like, there are occasions when and sometimes it does pay off, like, if you were, if you were doing a favor for someone, or you can see it's going to go somewhere, you know, like he kind of invested in that in that future. And I mean, if you hear DBM done of that, then, you know, we wouldn't be talking probably,

Hugh Edwards

that's true. There's always like a little tiny thing in the corner, that gives you the worry if they say it's for free, but you'll get great exposure, warning signs, because they're just trying to get you for free, right. But there are lots of occasions, I mean, you know, community radio is a very soul fulfilling type of thing. And in general, that's for free. But you get to meet nice people, and you get to have fun with it and, and help out, you know, people either in the community or local hospital, radio, or those sorts of things. charity works very, very good. Not only does it get you through the pearly gates, but it also helps you where helps the charity because you know, they need charitable donations, and your service is one of them. But also, you'll get invited to parties, by the charity for some launch thing or whatever. And you'll be sitting next to a CEO of some company that you just couldn't have sat next to otherwise, because you were involved in the project as well. And they're sponsoring it or whatever it is. These things, I think, are good things to do. I do see an awful I mean, the Facebook groups of this world are simultaneously brilliant and full of horror. Because you see an awful lot of people saying Don't you dare not charge for this you charge your worth and all this kind of stuff. But yeah, I mean, sometimes it works out and sometimes if you want to do a project because it's fun, go do it.

Toby Ricketts

Yeah, it's a balance isn't it to total balance because like cam like you say, like I will donate my time the same way I donate my money to to do certain projects like that and like you say it's very fulfilling and you never know what it's going to lead to often doesn't lead to where charity dinners for me because it's the airfares to get there a bit steep.

Hugh Edwards

Also, I mean, you you live further out than Crocodile Dundee went walkabout. Right? You're right in the middle of nowhere. So.

Toby Ricketts

Yeah, exactly. So where did it all start the voice thing? Have you always been interested in things like voice? Have you got any formal training? Like what was the genesis of your entry into the into the voice and entertainment world?

Hugh Edwards

Well, so I had a kind of acting bent as a kid. I was raised by am grandparents. I was Tiny Tim many a year in the Christmas carol on stage and things like that. And I just loved it when I was a kid. And I was always in theaters, with my parents. And in fact, the first time I ever got drunk was an after show party for one of theirs. But yeah, so I always had that in my youth. And I kind of kept that through, through my teens, and then into my 20s and things like that. But I wanted to be a rock star. That's what I wanted to do. And I was I was a drummer. So Ra went to university hours, never not a drama. And I went to university, and I wanted to move to London and pursue my fame and fortune. And my mother, quite rightly said, no, no, no, you got to get a real job. Otherwise, you're gonna end up on the streets. So I ended up working in investment banking. For nine years, I worked for Credit Suisse First Boston, and then Merrill Lynch. And I ended up being a relatively successful IT project manager there. And I was looking after really big projects. Big team, I think 60 was the last team size I had for this big project I was doing. But it was it was not what I wanted to do. And it was very sapping of all life. And the last four years I worked there, I shouldn't have, but they had these things. These, we used to call them the golden handcuffs in the city, where every Christmas, they'd give you a 15,000 pound bonus. And then in June, they'd give you a 10% pay rise, and you could never leave because you're always waiting for the next thing. Anyway, I was seeing a young lady at the time. And she said, Look, I'm out of here, I'm gonna go around the world for a year you can come or you can stay. But if you'd stay, I guess we're done. And I thought, You know what, this is like a perfect opportunity. So I went around the world with her. Before I did, though, I ended up speaking to Electronic Arts about some music because I've been doing music all the way through, hence the Rockstar dreams. And I went to bed for the second Harry Potter games do the composition for it. And we ended up not getting it. It's a bit of a convoluted story, which I won't go too much into. But we got down to the last two. And when we got down to the last two that we were talking about money and they said to me, what's your what's your what can you do this an hour's worth of music for and having negotiated loads of big contracts at Merrill Lynch which gave me great stead, I suppose for my life, said well, what's your bed Do it. And they said, Well, we couldn't do it for anything less than 30,000. And I was like, Oh my God, there's a living to be made here. So whilst going around the world, me and my best friend Jeremy, we started a company. And as soon as I got back after the travel, we started up and originally we were going to be doing music. This is 2001 I think it was. And we did so much music, we got a great contract for ITV, which is a big TV station here in the UK. And in a year, we did something like 250 commercials. It was it was very, very lucky, very fortunate. But it completely set us up. And then one day, this games company that we were composing for, for Steve Davis as World Championship, snooker said to us, you do dialogue, right. And we went, Yeah, sure, we do. Yeah. And having had a bit of training, and then a bit of directing of local stuff. And this, that and the other. We got Steve Davis in and we directed him and absolutely loved it. At the same time as the dialogue career 2000 to 2003 started to take off, I was falling out of love with music, it became like paint by numbers. Because one games company would say, Okay, we want some John Williams Star Wars II type stuff. Great. We'd go and do that. And the next one would be like, we want the Bourne Identity big drums Bum Bum bum. Great would do that. And the next one would be rafter sort of John Williams, like Star Wars type thing. Right? Right. Okay. And the next one would be like, we definitely want Bourne Identity as close as you can get. Okay, and it just, it just got really tiresome. But the dialogue was was allowing us to, to be creative and work with actors and, and bring life to things that at the time were being done. Not so well. You know, the dialogue in games used to be a bit of a joke. In the old days, it wasn't particularly good. Not not all, in all cases, of course, there were some really good things, but in the main, it wasn't brilliant. And so it just kind of took off. And I just did game after game after game and really loved it. And that was the kind of start of it. About getting into dialogue. Meeting Peter, as I said, 2014 and five. Then we just became friends for a while we set up another company called My ready voice, which was kind of one of the world's first TTS models, I suppose. Because it was concatenating phrases. Yeah, it would be like Toby, happy birthday. And you could sort of download that, but it would calm things on the fly. Right? And we phrases, right? It was Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It was like more like the train station version TTS, rather than what we see now. But yeah, so we did that. And, and it was it was a meteoric success until the iPhone came out. And then everyone realized that they didn't want ringtones or downloadable content for phones anymore, and it literally fell off a cliff. But by that point, we were we were getting into the training side.

Toby Ricketts

Yeah. Gosh, how interesting. So, so yeah, it's quite a sort of long weaving path. And it's explained so much, so much that I didn't know about you, especially the investment banking part, with the asking, asking about the budget, and all that sort of stuff. It's so interesting that like, there are all these skills that you learn on your journey, be it short or long that you kind of that you can apply in future to future future skills, you know, especially especially like things like that you'll learn about always ask about the price first. Because if you go in and say 100 quid, and they say, Oh, we were actually thinking 50,000, but no, your sounds better.

Hugh Edwards

Well, or even worse, this guy can't be any good. If he's only charging 100 quid because all the other quotes, we've got three or 4000

Toby Ricketts

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, totally. So

Hugh Edwards

that's what I do. You know, though, I, I say to, I mean, I've got children. And one of the things that, in hindsight, always perplexed me was why careers advisors at school never told you that, that your career path is an evolution. You know, it's very, very rare that you set out to be a postman, and you're always going to be a postman. You know what I mean? It's just, your life doesn't go like that. It meanders. And I really wish that they would tell children that when they're teens, because the pressure of having to having to just be an architect, ya know, that that's what you're gonna do. It must be really difficult.

Toby Ricketts

And I think studies say these days that people have five or six careers, if not more, right. So that was from a few years ago. So I mean, they're, you know, this this thing at the moment that employers are facing about how millennials just like, if they're not having a job, they'll just leave it and just like have, you know, 10 jobs in a year? Because there's obviously more jobs, which is yeah, like you say, so. That's how interesting that's, that's really interesting. And you've worked with some, some fairly big clients like after that in terms of like getting into the casting for gaming. After that point, like, you know, you've you've you've I was looking at your credits here. I mean, there's lots of really big stuff that Harry Potter name comes up quite a bit. What are some of the biggest jobs that you've worked on as a as a games director or casting and then directing for gaming?

Hugh Edwards

Well, I mean, The biggest name one is Harry Potter. Probably because that's one of the biggest name productions in the whole world, right? I got Harry Potter and my friend got Game of Thrones, you know, you win some you lose some. But that one I mean, I was by no means the biggest dialogue producer in the UK at the time. High score, which is one of my other companies that does all the production high school productions, which I wish I in hindsight again had not named it that because whenever I call anyone out there like high school productions, what's that?

Toby Ricketts

But anyway, it's clear, though, it's very clear, but

Hugh Edwards

well, because it was originally meant to be for music, right? So yeah, exactly. Yeah. Anyway, so yeah, I mean, we weren't the biggest. But we, we had a reputation for being very diligent, and always been very responsive. And we got the Harry Potter gig on recommendation, because the producer at the time was saying, okay, yeah, you can go with these guys. But you really gonna get looked after if you go with these guys. And that's what they wanted. So, clients, so we did that. Yeah. And it was a really interesting game to work on. Because it's one of the even though it's one of the biggest ones I've done. It's one of the few that was invoice matching. And so it was acting with invoice matching for the majority of it. The other side of it was creating characters that weren't in the films or the books, and trying to create good characters that sounded like they were from the world, which was, which is really good fun. But I've done. I mean, you've got to be a real gamer to know some of the biggest stuff I've worked on. Fallout three is a pretty big name and the gaming Fallout three Elder Scrolls Oblivion. Yeah. Lots of racing titles like Moto GP, Beijing Olympics, things like that. And now,

Toby Ricketts

here's the game boards challenge.

Hugh Edwards

And there's another one checkers, checkers party quiz, which was a funny one, you'd have to know who checkers is to get why that's funny. But he was a real character. Yeah, so I mean, I don't know what the final score is. It's over 300, something like that projects I've done of those. Not all of them are on IMDb. I have to say there's a lot more on the high score credits list. Yeah. And so I mean, most of the games that we did get some big ones like that, of course, but a lot of the games were smaller as well. And there's nothing wrong with small games. Nowadays, the I don't do all that many games. Now. I mainly do games that I still got contacts with where they still want me to go and do things for them. Because nowadays, I work mainly in the film sector. And that's, that's the area that I that I've kind of evolved into a little bit. But yeah, I mean, games are now kind of iterative. I mean, I do a lot of MMOs, which I've got one that I've been working on since 2017. And it's just so successful every other month, they release a new DLC or a new mission or something like that. And then that's another, you know, 15 days of dialogue. It's the game that keeps on giving. So

Toby Ricketts

lots of acronyms character in MMOs is massively multiplayer online.

Hugh Edwards

Yes. Yeah. The big online games that everyone joins and all plays together. Yeah. Right as DLC downloadable content.

Toby Ricketts

ancient texts effectively, right?

Hugh Edwards

Yeah, but the but nowadays there. You don't have to go and buy the CD for it.

Toby Ricketts

Yeah, absolutely. And while we're on games, because like, I had a question that I want to ask about, like the evolution of games, because I am, I actually spent a recent time with, with my buddy, we agreed to set aside a day and just immerse ourselves in games because he hadn't gotten to VR. And I've had, I've gotten the VR rig and definitely gotten to VR. And I hadn't got into any PlayStation titles or anything like that. And he was like, you have to come and like play like The Last of Us or something. Just totally get it. And yeah, hi, was my favorite game of all time. Totally. And it's, I mean, it's it is one of those seminal games that people just hold up as, like, this is the way it's meant to be done. And I played The Last of Us, too.

Hugh Edwards

And I was just really spoilers because it's in cellophane for me. Oh,

Toby Ricketts

nice. Yeah. Fantastic. I mean, I was amazed at how much like movies games are. Now, basically, there's this crossover, where you're actually watching the movie, but you get to, like, sometimes you're on rails, sometimes you've got a bit more agency about what's going on in the world. But it does feel like a movie. It's just being rendered in real time. With

Hugh Edwards

Yeah, I mean, The Last of Us. My when I was with my ex partner, we played The Last of Us together. And within the first 15 minutes, she was crying. Yeah, I mean, that's the emotional hook that that game has. Yeah, it's really quite special. But I mean, there are so many games, like the modern combats. One more Call of Duty Modern Warfare. Yeah. My friend Kirsty Gilmore has just worked on that. She has done very well with it. And yeah, in fact, we've I think we've just booked her for one Voice UK for this year. Oh, fantastic. Come and talk about games and experiences in that because she's doing really, really well.

Toby Ricketts

Yeah. Yeah, actually. And on that note, I've, because again, I've been kind of researching because I'm fascinated by the game genre, because I've never really, I've worked in it a little bit as a full service. And I'd like to do it more, which involves research and you got to find out what kind of games there are, what kind of kind. And a YouTube is such a fantastic resource because it lets you you don't have to actually go out, buy a console, buy the game, and then spend 16 hours playing the game, you can literally just watch someone else play it. And it's just about as enjoyable if not more enjoyable, because you've got all this amazing.

Hugh Edwards

I would disagree with you a little bit. But yeah, I mean, finally, what you're about to say is the is the opening to our gaming courses. I'm gonna start researching the watch the playthroughs

Toby Ricketts

Yeah, obviously. And like I kind of I just wanted to take a look because it was actually it was actually because Kirstie poker posted about this and said, I've just been involved with this project. And I was like, I've heard about this, I want to go see what it is I started watching, I think the previous one call of duty to Modern Warfare yet or that is that the current one I

Hugh Edwards

think landholders or something or other.

Toby Ricketts

But um, and I just couldn't stop watching. It was like addictive, like because they got the scene length just right. And they got all of the clever hooks and the action beats just at the right point and like so the choreographed so much like an action movie that it's it's crazy. And the storylines are so good. And I'm fascinated just how much like movies there. I mean, gaming, outpaces movie in terms of revenue hugely now doesn't overtook long it does now.

Hugh Edwards

Yeah. Especially since on demand TV has become so popular movies have gone down as well. So the relative balance within games has gone up. But it massively changed when they started paying attention to the storylines and the story arcs and actually hiring proper writers in to do these games. I

Toby Ricketts

suppose there was always Yeah, this wasn't Yeah, yeah.

Hugh Edwards

Because yeah, I mean, in the very early days, sometimes you had like the art director, or whoever writing the script, you know, and you could, you could do your best. But at the end of the day, the story arc was what it was, you know, it's been an it's been an evolution of all sides of the, if the game development world, it really has, from the education all the way up to the top of people understanding that they need to put more investment into to the production of these and that it does matter that you have a story writer there from the beginning, and that the scene directors are there from the beginning, and the voice directors there from the beginning and stuff. So yeah, the whole thing has evolved hugely. Ironically, my favorite games that I'm playing at the moment, are racing games, which are blogging, no. Wonder if that says something about me.

Toby Ricketts

And just quickly on the VR thing, I know you're on it, because I've seen because we're friends on Facebook, and I've got an Oculus quest, to it shows me that you like you're not online, which means you are part of the system that you're not online at the time. But I've been playing Half Life, Alex, which is like incredible video game and has some pretty good voice acting, too. But a great storyline as well. But amazing world building going on. The only problem was sorry, you know, I

Hugh Edwards

was just gonna say this is one of the downsides to the walkthroughs is that there is something addictive. If you haven't played games, there's something addictive about playing them getting killed, getting up and getting getting past that person. And then especially if you've got a headset on, it's a different experience than watching it on YouTube altogether. Yeah, there's actually

Toby Ricketts

no way to talk about or experience what VR is like without actually doing it yourself as my experience. Yeah,

Hugh Edwards

it's like diving. You have to do it, to understand it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah,

Toby Ricketts

totally. So we're gaming and voiceover overlaps, which is, you know, quite a lot of it because it's, it's everything else, pretty much as you know, it's stories written and everything's generated in the computer. And then the soundtrack and the voiceover obviously have to be made by real people. And, like, I've been really surprised in getting into the gaming stuff that gaming, voice work isn't better paid, because it's pretty quick requires incredible talent, and commitment. So what do you have to say about like, relative rates for things like gaming, because I mean, even the sag, you know, rates in the states are much less than the commercial rates, and even the corporate rates, industrial rates. So how do you explain the fact that there's some a bit of difference?

Hugh Edwards

Well, firstly, there is a historical precedent set for rates in gaming. And, like most industry, I mean, at the moment, we're trying to argue the ILR rates in the UK which are historically set incredibly low, just because of the way that they evolved in the in the beginning, which doesn't apply to now. That's That's one reason. And so budgets are built based on those kind of historical precedence. The second reason is that there is a just like films. You know, Gary Oldman is going to get 20 million, and the guy who comes on for the one scene with one line, who's spent just as many, just as much money in acting training or whatever, is not going to get 20 million, you know, he's going to be on a, on a very, very different pay scale. So, you know, if you go and try and book Troy Baker, you're gonna pay an awful lot more than if you book a relative unknown from an agency, it's the way it is, it's supply and demand. So games are also based on that, because they want certain style or some do. I mean, some, some games just will have unknowns in them. But very often, I mean, I did a game with Stephen Fry, for example. And I mean, I won't tell you what his budget was. But it was a large part of the dialogue of what the boss constituent part of the dialogue, budget, and that was done with budget from the marketing side, because they know they can market the game, because it's got Stephen Fry in it. So it's a combination of all of those things. And then at the same time, you also have to understand that a lot of games companies are successful. And, you know, if you look at Naughty Dog or Rockstar, you know that they're big, big, successful companies. But you look at someone like Rovio, who did Angry Birds, who are, you know, a massively successful when Angry Birds was successful, it was their 52nd game and the 51 before it lost money, you know, and these guys were mortgaging second, mortgaging their houses to be able to do that. So it's not always the case. I mean, if you go down to the the develop conference in Brighton, or the business side of E three, or, or game connection in Paris, or any of these industry conferences that happen, you'll find the big cheese's in one corner on a small table, and then the rest of the conference full of indie developers all doing games. And they're all set the same kind of way. So yeah, the bigger games tend to have slightly bigger budgets, and you can negotiate your way up there, the smaller games, in general don't have that much budget to actually play with in the first place.

Toby Ricketts

There's a bit of a pumped sort of a risk from their perspective.

Hugh Edwards

Right? Yeah. And this is also a commercial enterprise. You know, this isn't the BBC, these are sere a solo business people, you know, sometimes solo, sometimes two or three of them, raising finance, friends and family, you know, and they're the ones taking all the risk, you get to go in and do your job and then walk away. So whilst they absolutely understand that there is a question mark, sometimes over the rates on gaming, I think it's also fair to say that games are absolutely symbiotic. You know, if the art doesn't work, it's going to be crap, even if the dialogue is great. If the dialogue is crap, it's going to be a rubbish game, if the physics engine doesn't work properly, all of these things combined, and everyone has paid a wage to go and do what they do to make the end product. So just because the person is an actor, does not mean that their input is better than the guy who wrote the physics engine. You know, and I think that's the one thing that, that the world didn't really get when sag came about that the games company said, I'm sorry, this is just a totally collaborative process. And, you know, if we put you as an actor on royalty, we would have to put the physics engine guy on royalty, because they're just as important. So it's not the same thing, as as films and TV. Even if out is your question, there's probably just as many arguments against that, as there are, so it's

Toby Ricketts

very useful to to always look behind them figure out, you know, why it is the case. And as you say, it does make make a lot of sense. That, that, that it's arrived at that, you know, and and different sort of genres seem to have different parts to a rate. And, you know, usually commercial, the reason that the top rates and commercial are so big is because those companies will leverage it voiceover and make millions off it, like off that one ad, it has to be right, and you have to hit like, you know, have have that that magic that they're looking for, which is,

Hugh Edwards

you know, I mean, I'm not going to name the name of the person. But for those of you guys who are watching this who don't know, the reason that Toby and I know each other is because Toby cleaned up at the One Voice Awards. I think it was 2018 and 2019. And we just said, right, well, this is the guy we've got to make work for us in Oceania. And so we've kind of tied you down to that which has been which has been lovely and a pleasure. But but but you have a very specific skill when it comes to doing commercials. And that's what people pay for, you know That's why you get those ads for BMW and whatever. And I remember hiring you to go and help coach a friend of mine who was auditioning for one of those types of things to say, look, if you want to do it, here's the guy who's going to show you how to do it, because it's, you know, he's outstanding at it. So those commercial things, you really do get what you pay for. Sometimes, again, you they pay for big names. Others they don't. I mean, I've always had a bit of a bugbear that they would that things like Kung Fu Panda out of Pixar, or Disney or wherever they came from. We're always marketed on the fact that Jack Black was the voice when actual fact if you go back just a few just a decade and have a look at what Disney were doing. The names in things like Aladdin were all unknown, but they were way better voice actors, you know, way better voice actors. And then and then you just got this thing where it's just like, Okay, this stars in this one. You know, whoever it is Gwyneth Paltrow is blah blah, blah with a Pixar Animation designed around her. Great, it sounds a bit but it's not particularly brilliant voice acting.

Toby Ricketts

They've done a little bit of original stuff recently, like Mallanna and stuff. It's getting better. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, that's getting more sort of diversified. Especially which is which is good. Cool. So well, games and and and fees and everything. Thanks for going down that that little path with me, um, rabbit hole, that rabbit hole? Absolutely. So and one of the other big, big things you're you're known for. And one of the big things on your kind of on your who you've worked for sheet is a big it's a big question mark around 2014 and a massive client who you're under NDA for, for helping them develop TTS. Are you still under NDA for that?

Hugh Edwards

Yeah. And, and I was speaking to someone on a webinar live the other day, who used to work for that company just I said, I can't talk to and he said, Oh, wasn't it bla bla bla. And I was like,

Toby Ricketts

so it's a big company.

Hugh Edwards

It's a big, one of the top five big companies in the world. Yeah, yeah. So you have brought it doesn't 12 was the first one. All right. The first one? Yes, I did put them here. Yeah,

Toby Ricketts

absolutely. So you were bought in this, this thing that's called TTS, which has suddenly kind of enveloped us and like, was totally like, it's amazing to go back to 2012. In places like that. And thinking like that, this was like, you know, your computer speaking to you. And speaking in a very natural and believable way, was, you know, when when we thought of computer generated voices, we thought of Stephen Hawking. And it was very clear that it was being made up by a computer. But, you know, fast forward to now. And it's like part of that tapestry of our lives like that our computers talk to us all the time about everything at the stuff, the Zoom call, the lady informed us that this has been recorded. And so like, way back to be fair, well, that's true. That is just bad speech synthesis as well. So take us back to that beginning of TTS and and how you were you got involved in this, this large project,

Hugh Edwards

which segues quite nicely on to it for gaming. The very nearly said the company that the the company in question have to be careful. They clocked on to the fact really early, that they couldn't go to just normal voice agents and normal casting directors, especially people who did like commercials or TV, because they had no experience directing long form whatsoever. The only sector that had experience casting, going through huge voice casting things, and then doing long form direction weeks and weeks at a time with a game people. So although I'm not supposed to know, I happen to know that three of us who worked for this company, three separate companies were all in the game dev world. And so we we were the experts, by de facto by default, you know, because we were the ones doing that kind of work. Although it was quite new for us at the time. So we would we just went through massive casting there. And when I say big, I mean, you know, we're talking a couple of 1000 people down to one voice. And it wasn't in those days, there weren't the big pay to plays where you'd say, okay, 1000 voices, please. And they'd go short, Bing, or click here they are, you know, it just didn't work like that. We were having to go around all of the agents, we were having to be very creative, where we found people. Especially, I mean, I've done 40 I think it's 48 for them 48 Different TTS models now. And especially the majority of those were not English, UK. So you know, I've been I've traveled very well from that job, but going to places like, you know, Russia and Slovenia, and Thailand and I can't even remember the ones I've done for them. I'm trying to find that many people in those territories where they don't have voice agents, you know, was a really difficult casting gig. But you know, we had experience doing it. So, we were creative, and we and we found the right people. And so I'm not entirely sure what I can. And I got to be a little bit careful. But 2012 was the first one we did. And in those days, it was concatenative. So, as we were talking about earlier on, when you mentioned phonemes, the analogy for people who are watching is, as we were saying, you know, Toby, one phrase, happy birthday, second phrase, yet, whatever. So that's concatenating, two phrases stick gluing them together. And what the first evolutions of this would do is they would chop them into phonemes, which are the very smallest parts of dialogue. In actual fact, they were, if you want to be technical about it, they were Demi phonemes, because it crossed the middle of a phoneme to the next one, because it made them easier to glue. But because of that, we would have to record massive amounts, massive amounts of dialogue. So the first one I ever did was was six months recording. And it was five days a week, four hours a day for six months.

Toby Ricketts

Wow, no stop. And including just covering the phonemes. Like was this actually saving into like wav files, and then like uploading,

Hugh Edwards

so we created wav files, they built the tech to go and do all the chopping, and whatever. But it was it was very, very specific. And and this is why at the time, you had to say everything in the exact same prosody pattern, because you stood much more of a chance of of lining everything up and making it not sound buggy. The bugs are the bits that sound like where you get a little jump between a pitch shift. And it sounds a little bit like it's burbling. So that was how it originally worked. And we just did loads of them, you know, and this is, alongside all the other things we were doing, like, you know, gaming, and this, that and the other. And, Grover the brain, of course, you know, it was a very, very busy part of my life, I'm having children as well. Very busy. Yes, all of so that's how we got into it. It evolves massively, and very, very quickly into algorithmic and then different, almost like a kind of computer synthesis version of, and then it got into the taco Tron models, and then it's evolved since that, as well. So there's, it's been a really interesting thing to do, what it has done is it's given me a behind the scenes insight into not just text to speech, and which is the old way of saying it's aI voices now, which I disagree with a little bit, because AI is very far from Ai. It is not artificially intelligent at all, it's just an algorithm. But it is what it is. And I because of that I've got a lot of knowledge about how the whole industry works, how the whole sector works. And also about, you know, the casting process, when you're shortlisted down of those massive castings down to the very final one, they really want you, they really, really want you. So you have much more leverage than you think. And in fact, I was I was talking to a friend of mine, who was negotiating a game recently, who that they'd spent three or four months trying to find this one character. And I said to her, let, if they're offering you the contract, now you've got so much more leverage, you know, go and go for double. And she did and she got it. You know, and so it's something to bear in mind.

Toby Ricketts

Absolutely. Yeah. And, I mean, like, it's been a big part of the conversations that have happened in the voice world for the last two years, because it's, that's where it's really it felt like about two years ago, it's, it's suddenly became mainstream. And lots of small companies picked up the taco Tron to model and they put their own, you know, front ends on it and started, everyone started, you know, saying this is gonna replace voices. So there were a bunch of different sort of assaults on VoiceOver, not only that, like our work could be replaced, but we could be hired to do the work and then not receive any kind of royalty, like on our voices could be used for anything, which is, you know, in a few cases, especially the big standing case, which was kind of a landmark case from last year. That was proven to be kind of true. What do you think the biggest challenges are, where we are now because there's, we know a lot more about how these models are, there's a lot more knowledge about the fact that you know, your voice can be kind of like, quote, unquote, stolen? Yeah. What do you think the some of the challenges are? Where it stands?

Hugh Edwards

Well, there are a lot of challenges. So in the UK, we have a union called equity and equity are currently fighting a law that's trying to be passed through Parliament at the minute, which is saying that the AI companies can freely data mine, anything that's out there. So for example, they could go and data on any clips of you on YouTube and go and build a model from that. Wow. And you have no recourse for it. You can't stop them doing it. So clearly that's trying to be fought. That's one challenge.

Toby Ricketts

Who came up with also On what basis like because I heard about this, and I thought it must be it must be not true, because it's like, clearly ridiculous. But

Hugh Edwards

what it's been there for a long time. The the the original law has been there even in EU law to be able to assist AI companies and getting started. But not to be able to use your likeness or use your voice or whatever. And the new iteration of the law is so wide open, that it would allow all those sorts of things, even though it doesn't explicitly, explicitly say it, so that they're trying to get the law tightened back down again.

Toby Ricketts

It's concerning, isn't it? Good, Lord.

Hugh Edwards

It's very concerning. Yeah. So that's one kind of concern, then there are, it's fair to say that it is a very chaotic market right now. And in chaotic markets, there is lots of opportunity from both sides, so that can be seen as a positive. But it also can be seen as a worry. And the best standing case is a good example of that. Now, for anybody who's not clued up on TTS, who's interested or AI voices, go and have a look at the blog on grave the brain that I put on there. It's about as comprehensive going through all of the different aspects of TTS and the pitfalls currently, that we all know about and what to look out for, for certain jobs. Because there's, there are lots of different types of jobs, there are training jobs, there are voice jobs. There are model based jobs. So yeah, it's worth reading that blog so that you can you can get your head around it.

Toby Ricketts

Yeah, I might go do that. Because I've always been a bit a bit unclear about you know, what, what the difference is they say, it's just been used to train an AI or what your voice won't be used? And you're like, Yeah, but if it's training on my voice, it's probably going to sound a bit like me, you know? So I'm sure you explain that in the article. But other?

Hugh Edwards

Well, yeah, just to get on to that. So I mean, you have a pitch pattern, a prosody pattern. So I can I can extract it's called the, the F curve, I can extract that frequency curve, the frequency of your voice, and use that as a map to train a model without using your actual sound. Yeah, in exactly the same way, as auto tuners do, they work out what your what your pitch curve is, and then they adjust that. So this is not adjusting it. This is taking that as a template and putting it on. So it's still not using your actual voice.

Toby Ricketts

But it does sound a lot like it's it's the process that is associated with my, my performance, if you like,

Hugh Edwards

Yeah, I mean, if you think of, I mean, lots of actors that are that are caricatures, Stallone or someone, you know, Stallone has that kind of same type of thing, you put that onto a model, it's going to end up sounding a bit like Stallone, isn't it even if it's even if it's an impersonator, so it's a very unclear legal market at the moment, what is clear is that Pandora's Box will never be shut again. Unless some EMP pulse kills all the world's electronics, it's here to stay right and it's going to carry on. So I do think there's a lot of opportunity in that chaos. Gaming is a great example, where, once you create a TTS model, it sounds like that model. You know, if you if you're really, really sad and unhappy, that it will, the model will come out like that. And so you can build character models, which is what they want for games. Once you've built one, it sounds like that character, and it will only perform like that character. So they're not gonna go and put it in a different game, they might put it in the second iteration, but then I could have been in a different one. So it's only going to be used for that game. So that's a really good example of where an AI model can be really useful, where you're paid to go and create the model, and then whatever usage but then they can use that in an online way to just generate content all the time. And the same, in the same sense, as the

Toby Ricketts

one of the best uses of AI that I've heard is dynamic content within within, you know, multiplayer games, or just all video games so that you can have, you know, you've got chatbots that come up with original texts. And it's just, it's just the next logical step of that to have a voice that reads it. And you'd never get an actor to read a billion pages of scripts so that you have every possible word combinations. So it's, it does seem like the next logical step. And I liked the idea that that can be tied up to that character. So you know, as long as it's the company that owns it, and you're kind of either reimbursed very well to start off with the performance or there's some kind of royalty, then it sounds like everyone could be happy.

Hugh Edwards

There are a couple of other good models, the the Evergreen version of yourself is also a good model, where you create yourself and then you use your model to fulfill long form or whatever it is you want to do. The only downside to that one is that the marketplace doesn't exist properly for that yet. We're all waiting for it to happen. I suspect it's only really going to come in and then take off one once. Blockchain and NF T's managed to sort out watermarking and traceability of of audio, because then you actually can track it and you don't have to worry about the fact that your voice ends up on a sex doll or a porn site or whatever it is. Yeah. Which which is happening with with some TTS models,

Toby Ricketts

and voice 123 Sounds like they're kind of dipping their toe into that arena is one of the big players you know, they're getting heavily into into voice and, and making their own models of Have their their voices. So that's kind of interesting dividends

Hugh Edwards

that the other one, I did a webinar the other day with a company called altered AI. And they have a really interesting one where they they're doing speech to speech, which is different to text to speech. Yeah. So that speech to speech? Yeah, it's great, isn't it? Yeah, speech and speech is basically where you act out with a different person's voice. So it's analogous to motion capture where you're putting on a suit. And then the end result has a different skin of you know, a different person or a gorilla, or whatever it may be. This is you putting on a different voice. So, for example, I could act and have the voice be a child's voice, or, you know, an 80 year old female's voice, but I'm actually acting that voice out. So that's another really interest. I mean, again, that opens huge moral and ethical dilemmas of how you charge it and performance based on usage. And it's a very unknown area yet, but it's very exciting, I think, yeah, absolutely,

Toby Ricketts

gosh, especially in sort of gaming, like you say, but the, the top games guys are just do every voice and just pitch shift into different roles.

Hugh Edwards

But you know, I mean, there's, for the last few years, there's been a very interesting debate going on, mainly at the voice conferences, about diversity, and about who should be doing certain jobs. And whether a white person should be doing a black person's job, and whether someone from Samoa should be doing a French person's job and this, that and the other. And it's interesting, because traditionally, especially with gaming, the idea is that you're, you have as much ability as possible, so that you can go and do your main character, and then go and do the French guy, and then go and do the German guy, and then do the wizard. And this and the other. And, I mean, I'm not really sure where that debate ended, if it even has ended. And it's an important debate to be having. But what is interesting about this, is that speech to speech is going to blow all that out of the water. Because how, I mean, you've then got the performance of someone doing it, and are they doing it authentically, and so on and so forth? And if they are, why bother using speech to speech in the first place? And you know what I mean, it's a really interesting,

Toby Ricketts

yeah. How do you cast someone who's, like by their voice whose voice is going to be radically altered?

Hugh Edwards

Right? Yeah. I mean, Andy Serkis has got away with it yet, because there aren't any golems or King Kong's he's, he's been alright. Yeah, but you're fine.

Toby Ricketts

Yeah,

Hugh Edwards

that's exactly

Toby Ricketts

how interesting yeah, very, very cool. So and like we say, gaming, big TTS has been big in your sort of career. I was gonna ask quickly about, like, tips for people who want to either get into TTS or, or direct, you know, TTS sessions, or whether we're like, it's it's quite a niche, and he's sort of a thing, but like, what's the important thing to remember when someone is voicing for TTS or or or trying to get TTS voice sounds that consistency? Or is it now more authenticity? Would you say?

Hugh Edwards

That's a really difficult question.

I don't know. Well, okay, let me go back to the stuff that I that I was casting, we had a specific word, and I can't tell you what the word is because it will tell you who the company is. But it was kind of like, sort of TTS ish, right? So we would ask ourselves, okay, do they sound in the right kind of age bracket? Yes. Do they sound? Are they consistent? Yes. Am I going to be able to work with them? For that longer period? Yes. And that was just as big a consideration as well. Have they got good enough experience? Yes. And then the last one was, do they sound TTS ish. And that that one thing was the thing that got rid of 90% of the people who we were casting in the end. And I don't I cannot give you a written or verbal. This is what you have to do to be a TTS voice because anyone could do it. But to actually get the voice that everyone seems to want and like and hear that isn't aggravating that sounds right. That's warm in certain deliveries with certain text. That's, that's not too cold in other ones, you know, that can that can say that, you know, I don't know. There was a Holocaust and a million Jews were killed. And that can also say that you've had a package delivered, and it's still all work and still make sense and still be fluid, and it's a really, really difficult thing. The only advice I can really say is be yourself, I guess. Maybe ever so slightly more positive than neutral as a voice. So not big head jazz hands, but But you know, but not not unhappy so that you're sounding warm and confident. Yeah. And another thing that's massively, yeah, interesting. Cool. Funnily enough, I would say, if I were to give it a percentage, there were some people who were relatively inexperienced, out of the 48 that I cast, but I would say 95% of them had been pros for a long time, because they knew how to really control their voice. So yeah, experience counts for a lot as well.

Toby Ricketts

Cool. Very nice. All right, pivoting to gravy for the brain. We've got to talk about the name, because everyone asks, and I do know the story. And people asked me and I say, I can't remember the story. It must not be that interesting. Am I correct?

Hugh Edwards

Okay. Well, no, it is quite interesting. So, this, it's a bit of a clang, I'm afraid. It's a family friend of my mother's actually, a chap called Patrick Stewart. He's an actor. Who did that one. Yeah. Who, who did a film. And it was called conspiracy theory. And there's a bit where he jabs Mel Gibson in the neck with some truth serum. I think it is. And Mel,

Toby Ricketts

should work on Mel Gibson. That's your work? Yeah.

Hugh Edwards

He jumps in there and Mel's freaking out? And he says, what is it? And Patrick says It's gravy. It's gravy for the brain. And I thought what a lovely phrase. And I was we were looking when Peter and I was setting up to incorporate the company for not only something that had a URL available, but also something that that meant something that was that meant something to what we were trying to do. And actually originally a lot of people don't know this is that grave, the brain was not set up just to do voice it was set up more as a sort of udimi type thing to do different types of courses. And in the very early years, we also recorded things like an art of service course, we did a drumming course we did public speaking, we did lots of weird different types of courses. But it turns out that better what you know is what you're good at. And me and Peter were good at voice. And so we kept focusing on it. And that's where we got all the traction. So we ended up getting rid of everything else. But gravy for the brain meant food for thought. And so that's what it kind of originally came from. But it had it had a bonus and it had a negative. The bonus was everyone remembered it. And secondly, that it didn't have the word voice in it, funnily enough, because if you look at every single other company in our sector, they've all got the word voice and it's somewhere. And it means that SEO was really hard. Whereas for us it wasn't. The negative, of course, is that you have to tell people what on earth it is. And so our marketing budget has been a little bit higher.

Toby Ricketts

We need to we need to take that phrase from the movie and somehow get right to use it. Can you use videos less than 10 seconds long or something? We just need to put that at the front of every all of our videos.

Hugh Edwards

Maybe? I'll ask I'll ask Patrick. Yeah, but yeah, it was his suggestion anyway.

Toby Ricketts

Oh, nice. And then we next next time you're seeing it for a beer or something? years. So that's pretty that's that's the year that does explain that I can I can remember that. I'm going to go away and look, look up the scene.

Hugh Edwards

It's a really great film. You should watch it. Yeah, it's Mel Gibson, Patrick Stewart and Julia Roberts.

Toby Ricketts

Big fan of Patrick Stewart. I think he's, he's, he's fantastic. Yeah, so we've kind of covered you know, come up to Christmas, past, present and future. We've covered the past we've covered the present a little bit, I just want to end the present with like, what some of the big moments have been this year for like the voice world and for them for you sort of personally in the in the voice realm. Not the voice realm, the size, but

Hugh Edwards

I'd mentioned that. So for me personally, I've really enjoyed working on feature films in the last few years, and this year as well. I've literally just finished working on the fourth Expendables film, with Stallone and Statham and Megan Fox, which will be out early next year, I think. And I've done quite a few other films that highlight for me working with Martin Campbell, who's a director who did Casino Royale and golden eye and things like that. And I worked on a couple of films with him. One called memory with Liam Neeson and guy. Oh, Australian actor, doesn't it? ESM IPs, yes. And another one called the protege with Michael Keaton, and Sam Jackson, which was great fun. So yeah, those are really, really it's been an evolution, where I sort of graduated into the Hollywood films, which has been really, really good fun. And it's also good for my CV and just massively fun to work on, you know, great party. Yeah, yeah, they are. They really are. And the Yeah, so and the premier has a friend too.

Toby Ricketts

So in the capacity of like, ADR direction, or like, what sort of how do you interface with the film?

Hugh Edwards

Yeah, ADR, with the principles and the secondaries, and then looping and doing the background looping tracks as

Toby Ricketts

well, right. Yeah. So is there, ADR? Now there's been contention, because I've always taught it, that there's a bunch of different ways. It's either additional dialogue, replacement, or automated dialogue, replacement, or something else, which one of those

Hugh Edwards

so it all means the same thing. Those days, it was all historically based on the method that you used to do it. Nowadays, it's all done on computers and keyboards and things like that. So it's, it's all just looping basically, crowds, and those sorts of things. The ADR stuff with the principal and the secondary characters, principle being the main actors, secondaries being the ones that are either on or off screen or put on for some other reason. That's a skill in itself, because you have lip sync to do. And, or you're replacing dialogue and replacing performance. And sometimes it doesn't look right. And people forget about breathing. And the only downside to it for me is that, unfortunately, it's one of those things that you you have to be so analytical that's kind of ruined films for me and TV shows. And now I can just hear ADR straightaway. And it's just like, they've done this whole scene apart from that guy. That's weird. Why would they not do that? While I'm watching it at the cinema, whereas I was oblivious to it before, like the vast majority majority of the world is, yeah,

Toby Ricketts

I was here that slight shift in tone, just like when I'm listening to audiobooks, and midway through sentence, I'll be like, Oh, that's a different recording day. Because something changes, like the mic position changes and like, and they their position changes and that everything changes. And I'm just like, oh, wow, that was different. Yeah,

Hugh Edwards

you have to have different ears, don't you for this? Yeah. So for me, that's probably the best thing. I also really enjoyed working on an animation this year, called jolt, which is just out, which is just out the film festivals. Now that was great fun. And then, I mean, seeing gravy grow, we're just about to release a great for the brain, Africa, with Emeka, which is going to be great fun. So I'm really pleased about that. And I have to say, one voice Conference USA was a real highlight for me this year, because we couldn't go last year. And it was, so it was the first one that I went to last year was just insane, because the US wouldn't let anyone into the country. So we had to send Harry to Mexico for two weeks to then go and run the conference from us, for us remotely, it was hell. So it was really good fun this year to go out there and see, see everyone and interact with everyone it was, it was great fun. For the voice world, the thing I'm most excited about really is speech to speech. I've been involved with that company, sort of behind the scenes, and it's just got so much positive potential for the voice industry. I get sometimes people are a bit freaked out by AI voices, especially because of the the profit capacity and the and the pace that it's going, no one knows where it's going to end up. And personally, I love that kind of chaos. Because as I say there's opportunity there but but the speech or speech one is something you can really grab on to and it's it's actors performing. And it's designed to do exactly that. So I think that's going to be great.

Toby Ricketts

And like you say, it's that's such an interesting counterpoint to the, the very strong movement into into the world of like, like everyone I've talked to in real life, the last couple of years, I've asked them about the changes that have happened the industry in terms of diversity in terms of like representation on screen and that kind of thing, and how that there have been historical wrongs where where, you know, the wrong people were hired to perform something. And this does throw this really strange shaped spanner in the works in terms of like, it's now just about performance. And you just harm performance. It doesn't actually matter what you sound like, which is it's almost like a counterpoint to that, to that the pull of that to one way and to the other way. So yeah, I find it very interesting.

Hugh Edwards

Yeah, I would say on that note, just as a quick tip for everybody out there with your voice contracts, and hands up everybody who is using a voice contract in every job they do. As I asked a conference the other day, and I and two people out of 100 put their hands up. So firstly, make sure you are. But in those voice contracts, you should be saying for every type of job you have now that your voice may not be used for any inclusion in future TTS, or speech to speech or any synthetic voice models whatsoever in the history of the future without my consent, because, theoretically, if you've done an audio book for someone in the past, and you haven't got that, they can then just go and create a model from it obviously own the rights to that one. Yeah, so the text, they've got the voice, text, they've got the speech, they can do great model with that. Can you absolutely for now. So just start putting it in your contracts? Good idea. Something you need to do. Yeah, that's, that's

Toby Ricketts

a very good idea. Absolutely. Is it better to be a voice artist today? or 20 years ago? Yeah, I thought I thought there was.

Hugh Edwards

No. You said yes or no. But then, then oh, now? I think it's just different. You know, I mean, the everything's a bit rose tinted, isn't it? You know, I mean, I remember sort of thinking when I was younger God, I wish I was sort of born in the 60s so that I would have been around in the 70s. And then I, then I would have been a rock star. You know what I mean? Yeah. Because it's just like to flooded now, and all this crap that you come up with when you're in your teens, and you're failing. So, yeah, I mean, okay, it was good. 20 years ago. But again, you had to be brilliant. And it was difficult, because you were driving all the way around the country, you know, to radio stations everywhere. So you didn't get to see your family as much. There wasn't anywhere near as much voice work in the market. So yes, there wasn't as many voice artists. Yeah, they weren't p2p sites. But there's so much more than eight so higher. Yeah. But then, you know, I mean, I still know people who are six, seven figure earners now, you know, and that's, that's not a lie. That's true. Yeah. So you just got to be good at? Yeah, so six openings still applies,

Toby Ricketts

those six or seven earners can now rock up to their home studio, in their pajamas. And, like work for about a quarter of the time that they would have had to before?

Hugh Edwards

Exam? Yeah. In your pants now, and we wouldn't even know exactly,

Toby Ricketts

yeah, I'll leave you to, to just, you know, do on their own for that. And the fact that I it's just amazing how the how the walls are falling down around, you know, where you have to be like, you know, geographically and I'm in the middle of the New Zealand jungle. And like, I still do all this work. And and yeah, I love that about that. It's it has democratized and a bunch of ways the industry.

Hugh Edwards

Absolutely. I mean, there are all that many positives of from the pandemic, but one positive for our industry is that it is exactly done that it's taught, or it's forced companies to understand that it's okay, and that we've invested and we sound good at home. Yeah. And that you don't need to go and pay a studio. And on that note, charge studio fees people, because very few people are

Toby Ricketts

like, Well, yeah, it's one of those things now that you can put it on a

Hugh Edwards

line item in an invoice and say, here's the 100 is a 200 pound for my voice. Here's the 50 pound usage. And here's the three hours 50 pound studio that I did. Okay.

Toby Ricketts

And yeah, so that's what they'll do. Yeah. Unless you've gone for on those auditions that said, you know, client will use complimentary studio.

Hugh Edwards

Yeah, who does that? Who writes client will give me that studio for free on an audition.

Toby Ricketts

Cool. Well, I have covered I think just about everything on my list. Is there anything that we haven't talked about that that you wanted to talk about?

Hugh Edwards

Well, look at that nice little row of One Voice Awards. I've just realized you. Behind you one. Yes,

Toby Ricketts

yes. Above the whiskey.

Hugh Edwards

For all Toby when Toby started working for us. He wasn't then allowed to work to enter into the One Voice Awards anymore.

Toby Ricketts

It's such a shame. Even check the terms and conditions for the Vox awards the other day, but damn, I can't do that either. Sorry, right.

Hugh Edwards

It wouldn't be cool. Thank you very much for having me on. i It's lovely to be on Oceania for once

Toby Ricketts

again. Absolutely. Um, what is what's planned for Christmas? It's coming up very soon sooner than I thought it was.

Hugh Edwards

is ridiculous, isn't it? So Christmas is going to be a very small affair. My children are Christmas evening with their mother for Christmas Eve and I've got on Christmas Day. I think Gareth program is going to come over some lunch and it's going to be a very intimate small sober affair. Yeah,

Toby Ricketts

I bet you'd be the best they really can. Yeah, especially in the winter of the I kind of miss I do miss a British winter Christmas because

Hugh Edwards

very cold here over here six Italy. Freely cheese.

Toby Ricketts

Yeah. Now it's it got up to about 30 here today. So yeah, some comparison I can use. So I got to the beach on Christmas Day, I think. But yeah, I'm really looking forward to seeing you all over there in May for the one was conference and One Voice Award. Absolutely. Yeah, I've already booked my tickets. So I am given. Yeah, but we'll talk more about that because of the time.

Hugh Edwards

Indeed, indeed. Well, thank you very much for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Toby Ricketts

Thank you very much for for coming on. It's been great. Take care everyone.

A chat with Juliet Jordan from 'The Voice Business'

Juliet Jordan, JJ,  has been a voice artist in Australia for over 35 years, being represented by RMK for most of that time. She's now started a voice training company and online voice agency and is representing New Zealand and Australia at The Open Voice Network - set up to represent voice artists' interests within AI voice and TTS development.

Toby and Juliet Discuss many topics including:

How the VO business has changed for Women
How Juliet got into acting and Voice over
The link between psychology and voiceover
What’s the state of VO in Australia
Some of the key things about delivering great voiceovers
What is AI voice or TTS or speech synthesis?
How we can prepare for the this new voice world

Transcript of the interview:

Toby Ricketts

Welcome to vo life presented by gravy for the brain Oceana with me, Toby Ricketts. This is the voiceover interview where I interview people about all things. Voiceover And we have a good old chinwag about lots of voiceover stuff. So if you're a total voice nerd like we are, then strap in, because it's going to be a great chat today. I'm very excited to introduce Juliet Jordan, who has 35 years experience in the Australian market has been a voice with our MK for for many, many years. Now, heads up the voice business Comdata you and voice over.com.au as well. So we're gonna ask about that coming on. bookbound Welcome to the show where Julie Juliet?

Juliet Jordan

Well, thanks very much, Tony. I'm looking forward to it.

Toby Ricketts

Cool, fantastic. Now, it was a belated Happy Women's Day because it was a women's it's still women's day in America. And I wanted to Yeah, obviously wish everyone a Happy Women's Day. But start off with a question of how in Australia has been a female voice artist changed over the years? Has it changed?

Juliet Jordan

Well, actually, it has, because advertising seems to be using a lot more female voices than they did when I first started. I was in the business 35 years ago when we were slicing and dicing things. And it's fantastic. Because obviously women are being encouraged to to show up everywhere. And I have to say though, I've got one proviso that the thing of having one day to celebrate women doesn't quite cut it. I think we need to do better than that. Exactly, yes. Voiceover women in voiceovers, women are very much seen as the voiceover of trust. Particularly, it's interesting to see what's happened to voiceovers and the types of quality of sound that are used for women and adds after the pandemic or during the pandemic, a lot of more mature, calm. The sensible sort of woman sounds and have been utilized extensively in advertising recently.

Toby Ricketts

That's very interesting, isn't it? Yeah, there has I've definitely noticed, and that there's been lots of sort of comments over the last sort of five, probably to 10 years that there has been much more, you know, of a trend towards using female voiceovers even for things in a very traditionally male domain like cars, for example. It's a great example. Yeah, exactly. Like it's all about the sort of smooth female voice as opposed to the sort of

Juliet Jordan

boy only that but have you noticed that that in a lot of the ads, they actually have females driving the cars. And there's all these poor guys sitting there with these female drivers. They're also looking like they're enjoying themselves. But from my experience, that isn't quite the case.

Toby Ricketts

Fair enough. This is actually a great film. I don't know if you've ever seen it called in a world if you ever watched that film. I haven't seen that one. You have to look that up. Because it's all about, like a woman trying to make it in voiceover in, in LA. And and basically, it's, it's about movie trailers, but I'd seriously suggest you look it up because there's so much like voiceover humor in it. And you'd absolutely love it if you're if you're right. So let's go right back to the beginning and talk about how you got into voiceover because I always like hearing about people's stories about how they got in. And obviously, I mean, we're both voice trainers, we both deal with sort of newbie voices all the time. One of the big questions is, how do I get into voiceover? It's not the same as it used to be like, there's many more people in the industry has changed a lot as more work as well. But like, how did you first come across this thing called VoiceOver and realize that you had a passion for it and had a talent for it?

Juliet Jordan

Well, I think I have to go way, way, way back until when I was a little kid. My parents were really good at reading to me. And they used to read and put all the little voices into the characters in the books. And I would copy them. And I would also have loads of little toys lined up. I was for a kid I was banned into this huge trouble bed, I had this terrible bed to myself, and I got scared at night. So I had all of these little toys next to me. And I gave them all voices. And so I started to do a lot of character releases and all those crazy things so that they would comfort me at night. So voice and voiceover Well, how did I move into actually professionally doing it? Well, I went I trained in in London at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art as an actress. I also went to university in the United States and trained as a director and a psychologist. And all those things sort of merged quite nicely with also speaking, it's very hard to sort of shut me up basically, my my dear late husband used to say, and so I sort of put them all together to form a training organization. But I actually am digressing I should go back to the voiceover. I got into voiceover in US when I moved to Australia. After I after I finished drama school. I was, you know, destitute and derelict and ran out of money and everything like that, and my parents had moved to Australia so I decided that I would throw myself on their mercy and come over for a holiday. And that dad said, yeah, no problem. Come on over. So I came on over. And instead of sort of mooching about the house, dad said, Well, look, you know, you've done all this training and everything. Are you going to try to make some money out of it? I said, sure. But I don't sort of really want to stay in Australia, because did seem like the boondocks at that time. And so he said, Look, I'll shout you. There's an Australian saying shout, which means I'll treat you to write, I'll shout you a trip to go up to Sydney, because I was living in Melbourne at that time. To go and see people, you know, trade the board, show your wares where, you know, what are you made of go do something. So I went. And fortunately, that was a very useful little weekend trip, because I managed to score the lead role in the biggest mini series that ever been in Australia. Wow, that's a that's a pretty big moment. And that was pretty damn good was it. And that required me fortunately, to actually sound quite English. So I, having just come from England, and trained in lamda, that, that worked out quite well. And that was a wonderful experience, because the miniseries was all about the history of Australia. And this poor woman that had been a convict unjustly sent us to Australia. And she ended up by being coming the most successful businesswoman in Sydney. So I don't remember to follow this. So I went with that. And then after that, I got into into psychology and doing millions of personal growth courses. And this was a very good move as a voice trainer, because people kept saying to me, hmm, I like your voice. Can you teach me how to sound like that? And I said, Sure. And I from that, I started to devise courses and training and whatever. And an A parallel thing. I thought, Well, how am I going to keep making a buck by and devising all these courses and stuff. So I do about voiceover. So I went, and I applied to various voice agencies of which really, RMK was the only one at the time, run by the original owner of it, Ron Scott, and was sharply rejected by the agent. And I thought, Oh, that's not so good. But anyway, I decided this, I would keep on going as one does, you know, you have to be enterprising. And I made a very good demo, and put it all around the place. And then I ended up by turning up to different studios and getting hired as a freelance. Unfortunately, for one of those meetings, one of the people who I did a corporate narration with was best buddies with the owner of our MK. And he went back and said, I think you'd better get this girl she's really doing well. And so they actually called me up, which I liked. That was great for the ego. And from then on in, I stayed there for 35 years, loving every minute of it, they were a great agency. And then, of course, I really spent most of my time after that with my own business. Hmm. And

Toby Ricketts

yeah, that's, that's really interesting to see how, how, like the voice training and the psychology and level survey, like, you know, you've kind of ridden the waves of that as if you're like, I'm always like, going back to the voice of voice training thing. And people wanting to have a voice that sounds nice. It's my experience, because we, you know, we both run in person voice courses are on the New Zealand voice Academy, which, which, which actually sort of trains people which

Juliet Jordan

is incredibly famous.

Toby Ricketts

Exactly, this small plug for myself. And that one of the biggest things that always comes out of it is just the fact that almost no one in society like a be less than sort of to present to people even consider listening to their voice and how they sound to other people. Yeah, it's like the primary thing that we use to communicate with everyone else in our lives. You know, we we send emails and stuff, but mostly the relationships that matter. It's all done with your voice. And just the value that you can get from learning how to use that voice better. Is is phenomenal. And do you do you find the same in your courses that when people actually sit down and think about it, they're kind of like, you know, this is so important?

Juliet Jordan

Absolutely. You've got me convinced. Yes, indeed, indeed. And of course, people do have that initial response to their voice because they hear it differently, as you probably well aware, you know, when they speak, they hear it echoing through their burns of their body, and also coming back to their ears in stereo. Of course, when they hear it just coming back. They go from stereo to mono. So it's the diminished experience. And it does not compute does not sound to them like them. So anything that doesn't sort of compute with us, we tend to put press the reject button me like that and get rid of it. As far as the value of the voice I totally agree and have made a big business. Ever for past 35 years or whatever, because people don't think about their voice. They are now a lot more interestingly, because the word, we see a lot of people saying so and so has a voice or get a voice for this or whatever. So there are different sort of things that we're talking about with voice. So we're talking about, do you have a voice at the table? And is there something that you need to say? Do you have an opinion about something? And then of course, we've got the physical? Well, how do I actually say it in such a way that they don't sound like an idiot or whatever, right? So we've got it. So we've got to learn how to optimize the body. A lot of people don't realize that, that you know how important the body is. Many people as I know, I'm talking to the converted here, because you know all about this, but for the listeners here is that most people talk about your voices and instrument. Net, your voice is the music. The body is the instrument. Because if you get the body going, then the music comes out, right? And so we work with that. And then once you've got the How to the why. And then you've got to have the Where Where are you going to go and actually make your voice heard. And that's what we're going to talk about a little later about AI voices to, which is a whole new ballgame. Which where we've got our finger on the pulse here in Australia on that.

Toby Ricketts

Yeah, I'm very keen. Certainly, yeah. Yeah, I was gonna say yeah, like, when I've heard sort of radio interviews with, say, a CEO who's maybe new in the job or something that can sometimes be just something in their voice that belies the fact that they're nervous about the interview, which can then like, translate into the fact that they're not sure about their what they're saying, which can translate into like a drop in share price. Like, it's, it's amazing how nuanced the voice is, and how much we can read. Like, I always give the example to students of the fact that, you know, if the phone rings, and you pick it up, and you talk to someone, you can tell whether it's male or female, happy or sad, older young circle, well, like there's all these things you can you can intuit from someone, before they've even said what they're going to say. And it's all riding on the back of their voice. And so if you can grab hold of that, and, and actually, you know, kind of like, come up with the subtext you want people to receive, it can be a lot more powerful as an instrument. But again, we're we're preaching to the choir, aren't we?

Juliet Jordan

Yeah, no, I? Well, that's great that everyone hears that, because that's indeed, absolutely true. It's a dead giveaway. Ah, it's quite interesting now that we're moving much more into video, however, because obviously, a lot of work was done on the phone, lots of customer service and stuff. And now, it's now video or AI. And it's so the voice is taking on a slightly different appeal. I think that at all times, it's good to optimize what you have minutes, it's good to get your body working, it's good to get your voice working and take things out of the zone of I don't know how it works right into, into doing something about it. And you know, it's not as hard as you think, is it we have a particularly we've developed this, this structure of four session courses, basically, that take you through step by step, how your voice works, and how to develop different aspects of it. So by the end, you put it all together, and you know how to control your own voice, no matter what happens, because of course, you will have threads coming in from left, right and center. Particularly, it's interesting, the people we teach, we have a range of people, we teach people who are high level executives, most of the big movers and shakers in town have come. We've got international film stars, we've got people have to learn accents. We've got, you know, the local counselor who needs to sound good at a council face, we've got obviously voiceover students, we've got people and in the media, the news readers and things like that. And it's fascinating working with each one of them, because every single person has a special specific need their generalizations, as you know. But it's the one thing that I always find this useful that I've studied psychology is that I really liked the psychology of it, I like to know how to really help that person. It it actually is personal growth, through sound. Now, so it's about improving the person's feeling about themselves and their confidence. And confidence, I think is knowing that you know, so you've got to have something to know and then practice it and get good at it.

Toby Ricketts

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that I talked in the course is all about how I mean competence is key people want to hear a confident voice unless you're playing a character that's meant to be not competent or something like generally, even as even to get the gigs of voiceover. You need to kind of portray that confidence. You know, you have to you either have to fake it till you make it or literally be as confident you know, as you are. And so but the thing that scuppers that is usually adrenaline when people are nervous, that usually kills confidence, and it also makes you sound terrible. What are some of the tools you give people to sort of unpick that adrenaline surge when they get in front of microphones because even I mean it's amazing how afraid people are of microphones. And when they just devices that record, you think like, why are people so nervous? It's,

Juliet Jordan

it's like, well, why it makes people nervous is that it's just out of their comfort zone. They're not used to it. I mean, obviously, voice voiceover artists in front of a microphone actually love it. Give me more. How, however, what we work on primarily is the control of the body, which is, first and foremost, the breathing. And we work really, with martial arts principles, we work with very much breathing into the center of the guts of you. And that is an area of your body that really doesn't tense up. If you go into two finger widths below your belly button, you'll find that that's a pretty damn good, stabilizing place. And you might think, yeah, I'm too nervous to breathe. But we have people also think in different different ways and concentrate. There's one thing that when I did psychology at university, I did my honors degree in psychology, and I did it ran a sort of wild experiment, I'm tending to do things like that. I loved finding out about people and what they like to do. You

Toby Ricketts

weren't the person that locked them in the basements and maybe

Juliet Jordan

I wouldn't put it past me it's the truth. But no, I used to run these various experiments, one of which I put a whole heap of cookies on, on the road, on a plate to see what people would do. And I wanted to know how they would react if they were by themselves or with another person. And I had a few hypothesis about that. But that's not the interesting one. The one that I really did was when I had people have an experience of judging themselves and judging other people's faces and things. And about the whole, the underlying thing was about self consciousness. And I was fascinated. Why do people say, Oh, God, I hate that picture of myself. Oh, it's awful. Because people do the same thing with their voice. Oh, my voice is awful. Right. And so one of the things that I discovered was that people who have high self esteem, which we measured, you know, with a measurement and everything, tended to feel happy when they saw pictures and heard voices of themselves sounding sounding good. Yeah. Which makes perfect sense, doesn't it. But people with low self esteem as done by the measurements, actually felt happier when they saw pictures and heard voices themselves sounding bad. So one of the things that was fascinating is that people tend to want to, to match up what they think about themselves with how they sound, or how they look. And one of the things is, is if we can change the way that they're thinking about themselves, they can also optimize the possibility of increasing their ability in speaking. So that's why when we when, when someone comes in and says, Oh, Jesus, I hate hate the sound of my voice, I'm just hopeless, I'm never gonna make it, you know, whatever. We don't say, oh, no, you're gonna be fine. We actually go in and say, oh, yeah, that's really interesting what we did, how'd you get that way? And what's that about, and then work from where they're at, to build them up by giving them experiences and feedback, continuous feedback, which they can't deny. Because if they record recording, to hear their voice back, they start to convince themselves that they're better. So one of the things that's really important, I think, particularly in the recording area, here in our training is for people to get feedback. So they teach themselves more than anything and convinced themselves.

Toby Ricketts

Hmm, that's, that's a very interesting, I'm fascinated by the, I haven't really delved into a little bit, but the the psychology behind voiceover, because I feel like it is such a deeply ingrained thing. You know, how our society has developed, and I mean, and how I know chimpanzees use the voices of others, and how language has evolved. And then how we take that language. And we were able to talk like we're doing now about very advanced and often abstract concepts. And all of that has this kind of emotional subtext. And that's what what I think, when voiceovers, either consciously or unconsciously, can tap into that subtext that they're generating, when that aligns with the script. That's when you get the most powerful voiceovers. When the word you're saying and that the the tone that you're you're talking about is also reflected in this kind of ethereal subtext that's being generated, by the way it's being voiced. You know,

Juliet Jordan

very, very much so of course, when I went to lamda, I trained in acting and there's very there's millions of angles that we go into to make sure that we can get engaged with a character and that is absolutely relevant to to voiceover it's about total engagements and acting job basically,

Toby Ricketts

I have no straight voiceover Isn't it like you know, even

Juliet Jordan

everything one so we always have, even if we're doing a corporate narration, we're always somebody talking to somebody about something and we're somewhere right and One of the things we always we have this little formula that we give our voice voiceover trainees about the questions they need to ask just to get in to the character, and everything is a character, basically. So you're never just sort of, Hi, I'm the presenter from news 65 talking to so and so you're always engaging in some, and there's, there's ways of doing that. And of course, some people find that very difficult, they have this sort of bland thing. And quite interesting, because some people over engage too, you've probably noticed that, you know, particularly with find people who have had, maybe acting training they come in and they overdo it. So it's how to, to act more like a screen actor, actually, and much more subtle, very much in touch with yourself. Mm hmm.

Toby Ricketts

Absolutely. Yeah, it's, it's so interesting when we get, you know, new people in the studio, and often it's, it's a case of giving them the tools to, like I talked about them overcoming themselves giving themselves permission to let go. And I feel like people are often afraid to stick their heads up, and, and be different and be noticed. But that's kind of the one thing that we have asked to do as voiceovers, especially in auditioning is to, like, be different. And, like, there are some seem to be some people who are better than others at being able to tap into that, though. You know, you get some people who, you know, you they do a reading and you say, Well, that was that was good, but like, you know, Can you can you try doing this. And they do it again, exactly the same as if they haven't heard the direction. And it's, it's like, you know, some people are able to change their voice massively, and others are not as able to do it. And I still kind of maintain that, you know, with enough training, anyone can become a voice artist, but it was going to take some people a lot longer than others. Would you subscribe to that? Or do you think there's people that are? Yes,

Juliet Jordan

I would, I would definitely subscribe to that. I mean, some people have a greater connection with their inner emotional life than others, because they've had different life experiences that have got them to the point that they're at. And some people may have, unbeknownst to us had, you know, been attacked by a pedophile or something, and, and completely closed off an aspect of themselves that they don't realize, and then they get activated, and then they close off again. So one of the things that we do is try again, try to find out a little bit about more about the person who we're teaching, and how best to help them navigate themselves, their own psyche, so they can get into that space of engagement. But yes, you're always gonna find some people who are much better at it than others. And there's some they're amazing at that. I mean, they've just jumped anything. Oh, my God. That's great. That's excellent. The one thing that I think you've probably found, like we have too, is that there's part of us that feel a little bit difficult about training people in voiceover, because there's an overabundance of voiceover artists. And this might move us into that conversation about what what's happening in Australia, too. Right? There's everybody in their brother and sister want to be a voice artist, because they think they can make a quick buck, as I'm sure I'm talking to the converted the very listening here. But we all know that it's an art form, just like anything else. And it does require a skill and training and, and persistence, and business acumen, all of that sort of stuff, which is quite good, because some people will drop out because it's too hard basket. When we're training people who want to do voiceover we, we can sort of find out who really is going to be capable of doing it and other people who aren't necessarily so capable. However, what they will be gaining skills in the how to use their voice, which will be useful to them in any profession that they're in, but very upfront with people just to say, look, this isn't, this isn't as easy as you think. And we really need to get real here,

Toby Ricketts

huh? Absolutely. I think people do have have heard stories, or they've heard about how much sort of certain voiceover artists make, you know, it's like, you know, I did an hour session and I got $3,000 or something. And people think, Oh, they just went in for an hour and they got $3,000 When there's been like 40 hours of work to get to that point that like to just that job. And that's little and all the training and stuff you have to do. I compare often to like, if someone deciding that they're going to, like, be a concert pianist, and they're like, I really liked piano, I'm going to become a concert pianist, listen to this and just going in, like bashing away on a grand piano. It's like, well, people that is making noise on a piano, but people aren't going to pay to hear that. Like that. There's a big difference between being able to, like make music from your instrument, as you say that, you know, you need to put the hours in in order to actually you know, move people with your voice. It's just a lot more convenient to have a voice to carry around to practice on the distiller grand piano round. So, you know, portable Yeah, exactly. But I yeah, it I feel like it is changing. Little bit lots of people want to have a go at voiceover. But yeah, I don't I'm not sure whether we're doing a good enough message of, of actually telling like how, how difficult it is or I mean, it's difficult because so many people who have made it as voiceover artists have always been passionate about it. And I found with my training that that's the thing that really separates people who, who go on to do great things and become full time voiceover artists, and the ones that do sort of flower flounder around for a little bit, and then sort of eventually, you know, give it up is the passion that they have for it. You know, if you've got this really deep passion for it to start with, then any practice you do was really fun. And it doesn't feel like work. It's like a hobby, you know, that may eventually lead to you getting paid. So, you know, do you offer any advice for people who are starting out like the best ways to get success as a voiceover artist?

Juliet Jordan

Yes, I would say definitely engage with that passion, and find and find it in yourself, and then get technique, and then know where to go, what to do and what you need to put together. And at the same time, don't give up your day job a lot of the time, right, so that they're not suddenly put under enormous stress, thinking everything, putting all my eggs in one basket, realizing that there's a progression, and yeah, you can hit the jackpot. I mean, for instance, I'm actually a walking case of that. I mean, a lot of the things I've done, I've just walked into and just got the big thing, without hardly anything. But if you're right, though, to get to that point, I actually had a whole life training and stuff beforehand, but I don't actually think I didn't think of that at the time. It's just like anything, where's there's a TED Talk and whatever about having that 10,000 hours of doing something over and over again, to actually then have it really embraced in your being. So become masterful at it. And a lot of people who are passionate and having fun doing voiceover are actually already masters at it, because they all through their life, they've built into their psyche, this skill set that that's good. I think a lot of people's passion is being sorely tested at the moment, though, because there is a lot of risk and threats coming in to the voiceover industry.

Toby Ricketts

So let's talk about the wisdom industry in Australia, because it's something that I have been a bit unfamiliar with. I've you know, talked with Luke Downes from RMK, about the sort of industry over there, that was a year or so ago. The thing I still I'm sort of interested to see what happens is, you know, there's been a very stable state of voiceover where you've, you've had the big agencies running the show, and you've got, you know, voiceover artists with beepers who are just jumping in taxi as soon as they get the beeps sort of thing like Batman. And, and that's, that's been the sort of professional realm, there's been sort of dabblers, probably freelancers and stuff around the edges. But I mean, like happened in the US, you know, five to 10 years ago, there's there was a tidal wave of home studio people, and and then work to satisfy the demand for voiceover there as well. Being, you know, people like independent directors who are just shooting stuff on on DSLRs. And making small films, they don't have the budget. And it's not really a big production. So it's like, they don't want to pay the full agency rate for TV commercial, because it's just going to be something that they show, you know, maybe a couple of 100 people. So there's, it's like, shattered into a million pieces, the voiceover market, and there's all these different types of voice jobs around. And Australia is probably on the verge of responding to that. And, you know, with people doing training, like yourself engraved for the brain, I feel like there's gonna be more people setting up to service that market. Would that be an accurate description of how it's evolving? What are your predictions for how that's going to work? Well,

Juliet Jordan

it's quite interesting. You probably know that we have. So it's almost like in the sort of 1980s or something, I guess. Yes, indeed, the setup here is that people have voice agents and there are about 3.5 agents in Sydney, there are major there are major because we're, we're 25 million people in this giant land or so. And all of our work is set in the major cities around, of course, the major, major place is Sydney. Secondary market would be Melbourne, and then we have Brisbane, then we have Perth, then we have Adelaide. And then we have maybe Hobart, and Tasmania. Something happens in Canberra from time to time, but mostly everything's there. And that's how it was in the beginning and how it sort of still is now even though the internet is around. And we tend to go to studios or we have up until the pandemic pandemic, excuse my pronunciation, gone into studios, and that's half the fun really. So we're called in like, okay, get to the studio such and such forever. And so we'll race to the studio, your agent tells you you get there, you get the job gig, you do the job, walk out after an hour and away you go then Then the agent sends the bill. And then you're floundering around waiting for the next

Toby Ricketts

gig. Yeah, so most everybody hold down another full time job doing that, because you couldn't just

Juliet Jordan

Well, that's one of the things that was caused me a bit of difficulty because I was running this big organization the same time, and some often, there would be a call out for a gig. And I couldn't go well, because I was running a workshop or something. And what I used to do is I would put myself out. And of course, that's very difficult for an agency to deal with, because they want someone who's there all the time. Well, it worked for years and years and years. But in the end, I think it just became a bit difficult for all of us. Because, you know, it just is. So that you have to be on, on on tap, on call ready to go like, like a Uber driver. Yeah. And so that's the way it was. That's where it's sort of still is, but things have changed since the pandemic, because of course, people couldn't go into studios. And so the people really felt the brunt of the studios, by the way. Yeah, so they're sort of collapsing, left, right and center. Eventually, we were allowed into studios, but we had to take our own headphones. Interesting. I don't know why they if they wipe the mic, or anything, but so so we would go in and do things there. Of course, we began to start to do things remotely. And that has caught on. And there are a few there are a few very good voice artists who actually are in Australia, but they originally came from England, myself being one of them. But there's, there's some other good ones. And they they already had a lot of experience, actually with the international market. So they had home studios, and they just, you know, killed it. Fantastic. Yeah, totally. But a lot of people haven't still haven't even done that. Yeah, well, we're not quite there.

Toby Ricketts

It's it's it's a very technical part of the whole game. Like I'd say you need to be an independent voiceover just now you need the craft of voiceover how to actually be a voiceover, the business skills to get the work and to market yourself and to do all the billing and tax and everything. And then the tech side now is huge in terms of you have to run your own recording studio, and deal with other recording studios, because they're the ones that are expecting flawless audio. So you need to know what their perception of flawless audio is. And then meet that with with the your technical requirements and build build the right studio. And I feel like standards have slipped a little bit in terms of broadcast audio, like you can get away with more than you used to be able to get away with probably, but it's still a very big hill to climb for a lot of people is is recording and editing as to

Juliet Jordan

why we chewed into your wonderful seminars on how to do audio because you're an audio whiz. And this is where we recommend gravy for the brain to our clients too. Because it is it's a wonderful resource for all sorts of things, but particularly for the technical side. And so you're a bit of a star over here,

Toby Ricketts

right? Oh, that's good. I should do more technical because I feel like people get bored of my technical stuff, but clearly not I'm, I always find it very easy to talk about because I'm I love technology and I love sharing it so

Juliet Jordan

fantastic. And there was also one that I saw the other day, which was very well presented by the gentleman from Canada, who Graeme Spicer. That's right. And he made it so simple, but not patronizing, but it was really good. And so we've had some good comments from some of our clients saying that was a really good simple way of doing things.

Toby Ricketts

It was very good. Fantastic. That was that was I congratulate him and let him know. Absolutely. It's fantastic. What trends do you see in the Australian market? We've talked about the trend towards female voiceovers. But there's there anything is there been this, you know, ubiquitous trend towards the casual, you know, just say, well, you're telling your friend read

Juliet Jordan

that that's been here for a while now. There's been a trend definitely to for the compassionate. And the sort of compassionate female sort of breaks it in at the moment. The males, though they're still a bit blokey. And let's have a bit of fun. And I think as everything winds down, it's really interesting, actually, because, you know, we were all locked up for two years, and we've just thrown open the borders. Well, everyone's thrown off their mask as well. It's like nothing has ever happened. People are wandering around, we still will be okay. Okay, keep away, keep away, then now. It's just like, Oh, hi, how are you? Breathe, breathe, breathe, is interesting.

Toby Ricketts

We're not yet there in New Zealand, where we're going through the wave at the moment, but I think we'll come out the other side and hopefully be like,

Juliet Jordan

Well, we still have it, we still have just actually as much, but it's suddenly instead of being the front page news, it's sort of down on page five. What we've got at the moment if we've got the course the terrible situation going down in Ukraine, and then the situation here in the floods, so that's what's going down here be

Toby Ricketts

horrific, isn't it? So with you, I'm just conscious of time and I do want to To give us a big long chat about AI and TTS because it's kind of your specialty in Australia, like you have led the charge and in kind of heading up. And for those of you who don't know what we're talking about, do you want to just define the terms? Ai voice, TTS. Like, what does it all mean? Just boil it down for us.

Juliet Jordan

All right, well, AI voice or AI is artificial intelligence. So it's usually a digital compilation of something. And when we talk about AI voice, it's basically taking all of the sounds of your voice and digitizing them, which is quite easy, actually, if you think about it, because even as linguists, we can break down sounds into phonemes, etc. And we do that, you know, when we teach various articulation exercises and stuff. So all this is is a digital rendition of how we speak, which is not really rocket science, quite easy to do.

Toby Ricketts

Just gluing together different sounds that we can make effectively. So it's just gluing together the different sounds that we are capable of making.

Juliet Jordan

Exactly, exactly. So it's just a compilation of all of the sounds, you just digitize them and put them together now where artificial intelligence fell flat to start with, is everybody sounded like a robot. Right? And, of course, no one wants to in advertising buy from a robot unless they're buying robot wear or something.

Toby Ricketts

So Stephen Hawking, and you've kind of that's what you sound like.

Juliet Jordan

So so the thing that's threatening now to us in artificial intelligence is the the clever tweaking just like if you're in a recording studio, you know, you can tweak the voice and equalize and compress and all that stuff. Well, of course, that's all being done with people's voices to try to tweak for emotions and cetera. Now, you might think emotion is my God, that must be how do you do that? Well, there was a study a long time ago by a bloke called Manfred Klein's I think it was, and he made a study called Sentix. And that is a study of how, how emotions actually have a wavelength. And when you go and you hear certain things, and this wavelength, it can be either an audio wavelength, or it could be a visual wavelength of color. Because everything has a wavelength, it's all vibration, we are vibration, right? We have We are affected by that. And in fact, it's very interesting. If you watch the news, for instance, and you hear somebody recounting some, something that's really moved, that you will find, you will pick that up as well. And you don't know what why you're picking up that vibe, but essentially, their auditory wavelength is signaling it. And they're also their facial expressions going into certain things. So these wavelengths we are picking up all the time. And so one of the things is, is that people in in artificial intelligence development are beginning to study how to do that, because again, you can break it down into how to do it. It's, again, not rocket science. So the difficulty for voice artists in artificial intelligence, well, there are many of them. But one is that it's getting better, the scientists are getting better and better and better at reproducing sound to such an effect, that you really, there are some where you can't really tell the difference between your voice and, and an artificial or synthetic voice of you. Of which I've had mine made. And I can, it's very interesting. It's very convincing.

Toby Ricketts

It's, it's interesting, like the this the thing that I still find is because you know, they have gotten better and better and better. These these artificial voices, but they still aren't able to pull context from a sentence, a complex context. And then, you know, end the sentence in the right way. Or like this, there's the moment there's nothing other than vanilla. Like there's there's just telling it like it is theirs they haven't mastered emotion as far as I'm aware, apart from like, video game emotion, which is very big and very, you know, it's very, like crazy. Well, um, but soft emotion, like you're talking about the trend towards like a sympathetic read or something warm and comforting. Like, it's definitely not that nuanced yet, like, well, and gotten into that.

Juliet Jordan

I hear what you say, but there will be there will be it just studied and there'll be able to do it. I tell you what, everything's getting faster. We're talking about what what's that computer that can beat the chess masters and stuff because it computes so fast, right? Well, people are feeding in data all about all of this voices and stuff. And the computers with that sort of brainpower are coming up with solutions pretty fast. So don't think it's not going to happen because it will. And that's one of the things that we have to do now to protect the voice artists rights. And that's might lead me into saying some other stuff in a minute.

Toby Ricketts

Right? Okay, cool. Like there are a few Australian companies doing this out there. I'm trying to find my head notes on a few of them, but I think I think I threw them out there was there's one company in Brisbane. replica replica. That's right. And they were then great. Yeah, exactly. And they like, it seems to be that the one of the leading reasons that this, this seems to be two use cases that are actually kind of winning at the moment, and I feel like a lot of you know, work will go their way. One is in the era of explainer videos, where you know, it's basically a cost thing, if you can get the cost of voiceover right down. And it doesn't the quality doesn't matter that much. Like if you go to a business that has a few customers, and they've got a video that says what they do, if the voice sounds a bit synthetic, it's it still kind of does its job, like you think, oh, that's fake voice, maybe people don't realize, I don't know. But like, it feels all a bit sort of plastic. But that's that's kind of fine. Like, that's, you know, that's, I feel like that's going to take the entry level people into the industry, which is a bit of a shame. Like, that would be your first kind of voiceover gigs. And those easy elearning explainer video scripts, where you don't really need much acting. And the other use case seems to be around computer games. And the fact that, you know, they're introducing what's called dynamic content into video games, where there's no script, effectively, you know, that we've all known about chatbots for a long time, which can have a conversation with you. And it'll sound like a, you know, it'll feel like you're chatting to a real person. And there's time to integrate this into video games with, you know, a character that comes up to you and starts talking to you. And they're not actually on any kind of script, they're making it up as they go along. But of course, all the lines and video games are usually voiced, you know, well, before the video games released, there's a whole mess of past stack of them, the voices have to read. And they're all just fit into the game the right times with dynamic TTS. The lines will be fed in and generated on the fly along with the text. So it is like literally like meeting new characters in every voice game so that, for me that's like, Well, absolutely, there's actually no way to solve that with voice artists at the moment. But if you want dynamic content, you can have someone in a booth reading real time, all the stuff that AI generates. So so that is a that is a really interesting area for me. And also like talking about digital first voices, where they've actually haven't sampled anyone, they're actually starting to see how, how speech is made, and then come up with a new voice, which is complete, which is not anyone's voice. You know, it's kind of interesting.

Juliet Jordan

Not only that, but they're also combining people's voices, right to to create a new voice as well. The other area too, is customer service, to where their customer service, people talking back to who aren't there. But yes, this the intelligence behind everything is jumping about by leaps and bounds. Absolutely. And the other, the other area, too, would be IVR. And all of that is true, yeah, would be an easy picking. The one thing to think about is that at this point in time, one is more fun working with a voice artist, two, they're not as expensive as everyone tries to ride on their, you know, blurb and three, they're actually faster to usually, because rather than twiddling knobs to try to change the voice quality, you can just tell somebody totally, and they'll do it as quick as anything like that. So I think that that's, the more that we go into automation, the more also we're going to want to have human connection to. So that's one of the saving graces for this. But just like beater, VCR, you know, the video stores, the record players and stuff, every everything goes through this phase of fading out. But of course, records are coming back. So it could be that it'll pick out the people who are really good and sort of get rid of the people who possibly should be maybe looking elsewhere to do something.

Toby Ricketts

And is there any way? I mean, you know, you've been an advocate for voiceovers rights through this with over the open voice over network, correct? Yes. And how can you defend against the technology that will effectively just undermine it or make, you know, intermediate voiceovers irrelevant?

Juliet Jordan

Well, that's what we're doing. at the crack of dawn, or the middle of the night, because I'm in Australia, and everybody else is in the States or, or Europe or whatever. We have been meeting for over the past year or so, to figure out how are we going to save the day, right for what's the what are the harms and the uses and everything of synthetic voice, which is what we're talking about here with VoiceOver? How can we somehow rather sets guidelines before it becomes a complete shootout? Yeah. Because it's a case of if we can jump in fairly soon with something particularly of trying to appeal to people's ethics, right? You'll see a lot of these companies, the synthetic voice production companies, which by the way, many of them started with, with open source software that they've just gone in and then totally give me give me

Toby Ricketts

your handles toggle on to is most of those voice platforms, you know, Speech Hello, exactly. And this just have literally just copied Google's model, made their own models and just put a platform around it. And that's it. And no one really realized, like, I thought when I got into it, I was like, Wow, all these places in developing independently, their own voice synthesis things. And they're not, they've just literally taken all Google's research, downloaded it into their own website, and they're selling it off. That's had the massive downside of being, it only comes out at about I think it's 20 2050 kilohertz or it's 22 kilohertz or 32 kilohertz, it's not actually broadcast quality, and you can hear it when you hear when you

Juliet Jordan

pick No, yeah, exactly. Drastic,

Toby Ricketts

you know, yeah, I can hear the instant because it's not, it's missing all the top end that you usually record new Ss and stuff. And it's not because as soon as you double the frequency, you're at least cubing the amount of processing that it takes to do that, that sort of work. And no one's willing to sort of go that far. So that's a really interesting hurdle, that there are aligned that no one's really crossed. Yeah,

Juliet Jordan

well, there there, there are a few people actually. And there's a bloke who wrote a wrote his master's degree and to develop this thing called Lyrebird, right, which is at the basis of a very good software, called descript, which is the one that I've had my synthetic voice made with, and the it's incredibly handy, in a way for a producer and also for a voice ISIS. Interestingly, for instance, if you're given a script, right, everything is written in text. And if you have made a synthetic voice, which requires you to record a certain amount of not line after line, actually, had you read a whole heap of David Attenborough's latest documentary or something, right. And you they need less and less and less now, it used to be lots of lines, but not so much

Toby Ricketts

anymore. Yeah, I did one that was like 10,000 20,000 words. Yeah, yeah. Ridiculous.

Juliet Jordan

Things that don't make sense or anything. But this one was quite interesting, really, it's like was like reading a docker. And then what happens is, is that you type something in, and then let's say a word has changed. Someone's, your client says, Look, would you please change clients to clients, or whatever. So instead of doing a drop in re record, blah, blah, blah, you can actually just change the type, you just type the script differently. And your synthetic voice will fill in the the bit and if it's a good synthetic voice, you can't tell the difference. And so it's a very quick edit. So it's, there's a lot of people doing their podcasts that way, you can also link it up with visuals and, and whatnot.

Toby Ricketts

That's right. You basically go in and voice something, it converts it into text, and then you can basically edit it afterwards. And yeah, absolutely. Audio again, it's just,

Juliet Jordan

exactly it's gonna You can even visuals as well, because it has the capability. And also, I highly recommend going to their website because they have some of the cleverest marketing videos I've seen in a long time I've seen really, did you? I don't know, I

Toby Ricketts

know, I've seen that six months ago. And I thought that is a very compelling marketing video, like very, very compelling for someone like me, it's a bit of a.

Juliet Jordan

But what I wanted to go to and warm voice artists is that, that a lot of these synthetic voice production companies have they have terms and conditions, right. And of course, as temperature conditions, we know they go on forever and ever and ever and ever one rainy friend, right? And so sick. Yeah, I agree without ever having had a look. Well, this is where they catch you out. Because they have things about how they're going to use your voice, how they can keep your voice, how they can distort your voice, how they can mix it with somebody else's voice, and whatever. And once it's mixed with somebody else's voice, whose voice is it, right? And all of this, and this is the thing that we're doing at the open voice network. We're trying to figure out all the parameters that need to be understood, particularly by production houses so that they don't go and rip off us. Voiceover voiceover artists, right? Because I know that you probably know that we're sweet people, we tend to want to just do the best for everybody. And we'll bend over backwards to help and flexible to the point of contortion isms, basically. And this is something that we need to put our foot down just like we have, you know, sag AFTRA and here in Australia we have media entertainment arts allow alliances which you also have a New Zealand to right, because we share the share the same thing. Yeah, it's

Toby Ricketts

definitely has a presence over here. I'm not sure if there's a formal presence or whether we're just whether the agents well,

Juliet Jordan

you actually do you actually you actually do have somebody who's the Chief of New Zealand and everything. Oh, good.

Toby Ricketts

I should be Yeah.

Juliet Jordan

Well, you might have to find out about that. Yeah. Well, she she was a she last time I looked. But we're going in and trying to figure out how to get some sort of rules of the game set up. Right because people actually tend to be pretty fair. They know. But the one thing is at the moment in time, everything is stacked in these terms and conditions against the voice artist, one of the, I mean, sorry, go ahead,

Toby Ricketts

one of the arguments will be that they'll always be someone that will allow their voice, you know, if someone puts up a job for 500 bucks on one of the voice platforms and says, you know, hey, digitize your voice, we'll pay you 500 bucks, and we can use it for anything, there will be someone that goes for that there might not be that good. And maybe that's, you know, that's the argument against us that, you know, well, yeah,

Juliet Jordan

there. There's always going to be that. Yeah, right. And there's always going to be beyond that. Remember, because this intelligence is being able to recreate voices, no matter whether it's a real voice, it's got enough data, to get all the real voices in the world, you just analyze all of that stuff. And you can make anything this is this is like a witch's brew here. Right? So we are basically sitting on the potential to be wiped out. Not quite yet. And, and not totally right. I know a lot of people saying, Oh, don't worry, if you do still have a lot of work and stuff. But actually, you're not going to have a lot of work in that in many areas. But if you do want to have some work in that area, then we're gonna need to protect ourselves and have some rules of the game. So that's why we're going guns blazing into sorting this out as fast as we can.

Toby Ricketts

So how does that work in Tim, like, practically, is that does that happen at a state level, like in terms of countries legislating, and having formal legislation that prevents people from, you know, having royalty free digital voices? How does that actually enacted and who you love?

Juliet Jordan

Yeah, well, that's that's the that's the trick. So one of the obviously the bodies that are quite helpful unions. They're the ones that and particularly like in Australia, or union, it's actually set the rate for voiceovers one of the difference, major differences, which I think makes it quite easy to function Australia is that we have pretty much set rates for things we don't do all this negotiation, business agents, the red card, and they will Yeah, well, they agents obviously negotiate extra here and there, and particularly for international work, but but there's sort of rules of the game in place, and it just makes it flow really easily. People know that they're going to pay this this for this job, and blah, blah, blah. And it makes everything pretty smooth. Difficulty, of course, for Australian boys agents, voice actors trying to go overseas is that they get absolutely flummoxed by all this negotiation business. They think, Oh, my God, I don't know what to charge or do I do the charge for fiber? Or I don't know what's going on. And they get lost? Completely. Totally. Yeah. Which is, that's why we haven't seen quite quite a lot of voice actors going international.

Toby Ricketts

Right. Yeah, I mean, great for the brain obviously has at some rate Guide, which we've tried to make a central point, which is international, because there's there's plenty of centralized voice records that there's the VOA rate card, and there's the mea rate card, and then there's unions as well, which have their own separate record, and growth for the brain. Anyone can check out at rates dot growth for the rent.com. And you can put in your country and what the production isn't, it's got like, you know, local persons said what the kind of the rates are, which, which is, you know, I think it's quite helpful. But the in terms of going back to like the union setting rates and stuff that the union in the States, especially, which is where this will probably be ground zero for in terms of AI voice stuff, you know, the unions have been losing ground for for decades. And in terms of that, there's been more and more non union work, there's still some, you know, there's still a good healthy sort of core of in union work, but it has been less than less since like the 90s. You know, when when they hadn't, they didn't, arguably, they didn't really keep on top of you know, taming the market and keeping people in line. So I just wondered, like, they'll have to get a lot stronger if they're going to move into this tech space, which they might not understand as well, because it's evolving so quickly. And if you have digital first voices, where someone just tweaks and tweaks and tweaks until they go, Oh, that sounds like a real voice. That doesn't belong to anyone. So is that exempt from the

Juliet Jordan

Yeah, yeah, this, you're right. It presents a lot of challenges. That's why we also want to educate voice artists, you know, that one, that's the whole point of where the brain to is to educate voice artists about what exists, what's around what your rights are, to stop sort of the prices going down and to know and to support each other. So we want to we want to team up here. And the one thing that I would like to say to all the gravy of the brain is particularly those overseas is don't forget Australia. We're a big gig out here. You know, even though it might seem like we're the back of the boondocks or something. It's interesting. I'm sure many of you have visited Australia, but for those who have not, if you live in Australia, Europe feels like next door, right? Unfortunately, with all this war going on, we were very moved by the whole thing, right? But I'm essentially from the other way, because I was born in England lived in England, when I look back to Australia, it wasn't even in my mindset, you know, like, Australia. Where's that? That's somewhere and What's New Zealand? That's New Zealand lamb. I remember that from butcher's shop. Right? That's about it. But see if you can wrap your mind around, including us where the Asian Pacific area, we're huge. We've got Singapore, China, Malaysia, Vietnam, all this sort of stuff. These are markets that are whopping, there's billions of people here. So don't discount us.

Toby Ricketts

In terms of that's why Ray, are you talking about cutting in terms of casting Australians for those roles, or moving creative agencies to Australia?

Juliet Jordan

Ah, interesting, you know, thinking, putting Australians into the loop in terms of perhaps narrating things, because one of the things is that companies around this Asian Pacific area you probably discovered, because you do these multiple accents and stuff, which I do also, the thing is, they want this middle Atlantic Trans Pacific type of accent. And Australians, if they're not, you know, aka Australians, and then like that, you will find there, they're actually very good sitting in the pocket of this particular area. So lots of lots of markets around this area could be served very well with an Australian or New Zealand voice that's toned down, right. So we don't want it we're not talking about shrimp on the barbie. Right? Dandy stuff.

Toby Ricketts

Yeah, I wonder if we could come up with a new accent that's like an APEC accent. You know, it's kind of got a bit of Australian but if New Zealand and maybe even a little bit of Asian and it just feels different from that northern hemisphere middle, and it's like the antithesis to the mid atlantic vibe. Because I've done voiceovers like that for Microsoft, I did run for which was like an Asia Pacific region wide TVC where they wanted like a little bit of an Asian accent, but a little bit of kiwi, and you know, and a tiny bit of those American vowels, just to sort of you know, because because quite a lot of the Asian countries have the rotate our way back in the American accent. So it's gonna be interesting to see what happens with accent trends and stuff as well. Well, there we are. So we,

Juliet Jordan

we've got a challenge on our hands to accent What's that? Hey,

Toby Ricketts

APEC, the APEC accent, I'm gonna I'm gonna start promoting myself as I did. So, let's spend a tiny bit more time on the AI stuff with a little bit more time. Again, where do you see it going? Because like, if you can't legislate against it, and technology, like like, because the feedback I've heard from like the voice 123 trial, you know, voice 123 did a trial with AI voices alongside regular voices on their platform. And, and there's, there's a, there's a class of clients who don't care, they just want the voiceover just just a you know, whatever, cost less, I don't really care. But most of them wanted performance over price. Yeah, especially in the kind of, you know, the say, the top half of the median in terms of spend. And that bodes quite well for voice artists, I guess until the technology catches up. Yes. Like, what do you see as the future? Because at the moment, I mean, hopefully AI peaks too soon, everyone hears it and goes, That's rubbish. And then they don't select it when it gets better in the future? Because they just think that's rubbish. That's

Juliet Jordan

interesting. Yes, I think for some people, that would would be true. I think it's a case of like anything, when anything new comes in, people sort of find it fascinating. And they tried to twiddle the knobs and use it and stuff, then they find it too hard, or it's not really as good as you think. And then they either drop off of it and burnt basically don't want to use it again, like some of the people you're talking about. Other people will sort of come as later. It's just the, you know, different types of people who buy things at different stages. And so people come in later when it's more developed, and they'll say, Oh, this is easy. This, why didn't I do this before? This is fantastic. This has saved me a whole heap of money and whatnot. And then of course, there are the people like the luxury buyers, like you said, the people the top end of the market with the money. Why waste your money on artificial when you get real for heaven's sakes? Yeah. So essentially, they are buying, like prestige buyers, you know, they'll buy the Bentley for heaven's sakes.

Toby Ricketts

Yeah, why not? I wonder if there's a strategy to kind of try and get rid of AI. before it even starts is what what it is, is a list. Let's get rid of AI. Well, in terms of possible, less successful would be like What the? What the meat industry did when vegan products started getting onto the market was they started their own vegan meat companies and made it awful and flooded the market with terrible vegan products. So that people tried them, hated them and then went back to eating meat allegedly. I don't know if that's true, but it's a great strategy potentially. So like maybe you know, ovan could actually develop its own terrible voices.

Juliet Jordan

Okay, I like that. Server terrorists. Ai team going in to destroy the AI world. I'll put that to the meeting. We're having a meeting next week.

Toby Ricketts

I think they'll find that awfully fascinating, amusing, if nothing else, you would have heard of the Bib standing story and tech. Yeah. You know, she's a great for the brainer, of course, one of my fellow territory controllers that set a precedent in a way that people couldn't just reuse software involving someone's voice on another platform. What was Owens kind of response to the bib standing case?

Juliet Jordan

They thought it was absolutely fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. And she's part of our group now. She's up for a couple of meetings. And another person too, who's done an enormous amount, I think for AI and educating voice artists and Gan boozer with her wonderful series, her podcast series on voice and AI, which I highly recommend people. People see she's her husband also works in in AI too. But she's doing a very good job, interviewing some really interesting people in the production end of AI and finding out what their thinking is. So definitely tune into her podcast on vo boss, that's good. I don't if I'm allowed to mention that, but I think probably she's an affiliate.

Toby Ricketts

Actually, I listened to her episode about I was doing some research on a an outfit called scribe audio don't know if you heard of scribe audio. But they they're an AI voice company, which has come up with this concept of digitizing the back catalogue of publishers with AI voices. Yes. So instead of their big titles, which they get voiced by audiobook narrators, there's all these books where they only sell 100 copies a year. But the AI is voicing them. And they approached me to be one of the like narrators that did this thing. And so I wanted to know more about the company, and they seemed really good and legit. And then they sent through the final contract. And I hate contracts. And I never read them. But I thought you should read this one, you should absolutely read it. And I did. And I found two clauses, which gave me quite a lot of concern. And there were along the lines of we can use it for anything we want. You know that it's an infinite time period sort of thing. And I was like, I want to ring fence some of this like this is not I'm not okay with this. And I never heard back from them again. So I don't know whether it's just because they forgot about me or whether because

Juliet Jordan

now you would have been causing too much trouble possibly. I know, we know about that. And that's a lot to do with that is a definite market, there are loads and loads of books that are, as you said, not many, you know, just like 100 copies or whatever, that they want to be turned to audiobooks and AI works really well for that. So they want to do obviously as a as a voice that they could distort to use for loads and loads of these books. Now, if you had a greater I think you got paid per book or something. So you actually did get residuals as it were, which is quite a good deal. But yeah, no, then the contract is they can use it for anything. Yeah, it's difficult when they say they can use it for everything and distort it and stuff. And that's what a lot of the terms and conditions say that's why we got to read them, then we got to say something about that. But yeah, so this is you've also brought in a possibility for voice artists, though, because it could be and that's one of the things that we say here is that you can lend your voice to for good things. Right? It could be that you can make money off of it for residuals because you have one recording and they do all sorts of things with it and just keep getting some money in. But it's going to be a pittance, by the way, right? It's not like wonderful residuals that we tend to get from commercials and stuff. You can also lend your you can also lend your voice to people who don't have a voice. And this, of course, is what RuPaul Patel is doing. She's got a whole thing. She'd been at this for a while getting people's voices and then creating synthetic voices for people who, who need to be able to speak like for instance, in the olden days, I a young girl who didn't have a voice, right? For the through some illness or was born that way. If she wanted to talk, she had to have the voice that was an electronically recorded older man or something. So it just was weird. It was like was a call that that thing when Linda Blair sort of the exocyst or so. So one of the things is, is that they're now getting voices of all sorts of people in ages to help people who don't have a voice like Stephen Hawkins for instance, right? He there are ways of lending your voice and for good, that really helped people too. And also you can save your voice at different ages. So imagine your turn out to be old and gray and you think I can do a young voiceover I'm just going to whip up my young 26 year old voice. And so you get your 26 year old synthetic voice to do the ad and they weren't think of the range that you have. Mm hmm.

Toby Ricketts

It's so interesting, isn't it? All these possibilities but like you say what Be nice to have some kind of licensing structure around, or the ability to have a voice print that you could search the internet for your voice. And it would I mean, that would be a great tool, someone could develop a tool that would listen to all the ads playing on stations, and figure out whether you had been paid royalties on that if they were just using it without permission.

Juliet Jordan

That's That's true. And that, of course, is doable. And that's one of the things we're talking about watermarking. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. We had a Chinese gentleman come and join us for as a, as a guest, one in one of our meetings, and they want to set up a huge big database of people's voices in China. We said, an interesting idea, but I don't know if you're gonna get too many Europeans to want to do that. Interesting, but bear in mind, that's already being done. Yeah. Because and here's a real freaky one, right? Well, we already know about deep fakes and people's faces and stuff. But obviously, deep fake voices are being made. What's happening is, is that lots of this affects us could be trained a lot of corporate executives, a lot of big executives have had recorded shareholders meetings, and whatever, whatever their voices are recorded, and their voices are being then synthesized. And then people are emailing the lesser beings in their, in their company with a voice recording from the CEO saying, please send money to such and such. Yeah, in the past, it used to just be emails with the CEO signature and stuff. But now when God LISI his voice telling you to do it, where do you go? Right? So this is this is, people get very creative with how to use people's voices for bad as well as good

Toby Ricketts

with discernment to how powerful the human voice is, if the CEO does, you know, phone you at your desk, you're going to do what he says. And if you'd unless you know about that technology, as we do now, with, you know, email scams and stuff. Most people won't send money offshore from an email, but still happens, and I'm sure it will happen with voice, as you say, in the coming decades. It's at all. Yeah, it's all very interesting. It'll be interesting to see what happens in that space. Who knows when we'll actually have some answers to these questions.

Juliet Jordan

So that's, that's essentially why we're formed as a group to actually educate this educational organization, not, you know, when you're not, thank you for the opportunity to talk, by the way, because this is helping to start people thinking about the vague and not to be too complacent. And we're going to give them people ideas of what to do. We've got we've been drawing up contracts, that 10 templates of contracts, which look after the interests of both the production, the producer of the synthetic voice, and also the voice artists. And so it's a case of come pulling your head out of the sand, and actually realizing that we need to do something. Because it is happening,

Toby Ricketts

it is happening, where can people find these educational resources from over on?

Juliet Jordan

Well, you're going to find them from Oman, we're going to be talking about them, and we're going to be producing them. Also, we are developing a site, which is going to be an educational site that we'll be launching very soon, which is just basically going to be an educational site for people called AI voices. And it's going to be everyone can bring their voice in and, and talk about things. It's we're going to show you where you can get contracts, who the people are, where to go and stuff. So it's going to be a bit of a hub.

Toby Ricketts

Right? What's the timeline for development on that?

Juliet Jordan

Probably about another month.

Toby Ricketts

Okay, cool. It's quite it's, it's nearly finished. Fantastic. Oh, thank you for joining me today. It's been a great chat about all things Australia and voice and AI voice so well. Yeah. Thanks for your time.

Juliet Jordan

Well, thank you very much for having me. All the best