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

VOLIFE Global Voiceover Blog

A chat with Juliet Jordan from 'The Voice Business'