How Text to Speech can Reduce Training Design Costs
Matt Archer
May 27, 2021
What is Text to Speech?
Text to speech is a function that many computer applications provide, which takes text that is in written form and verbalizes it so that it can be heard instead of read.
Many people tend to associate text to speech with robotic-sounding voices that did a poor job intonating and pronouncing a lot of words, which made it humorous at best, and difficult to understand at worst.
However, text to speech has improved dramatically from those olden days, and in some cases can rival that of professional voice acting in tone, pronunciation, and quality.
What is Text to Speech used for?
Text to speech is often utilized for services where people are unable to read the text on the screen, such as while driving, or for people who are visually impaired. It has also become more popular as people want to listen to audio books.
From a training development perspective, text to speech can be used in almost any place traditional narration is used, such as instructions, narrative content, voice overs for characters, interactive elements and more. It can also help to quickly read back content that is written to review word order, choice of wording and language use, etc.
5 Ways Text-To-Speech can Save Time and Money
Provides Consistently High-Quality Narration
As mentioned earlier, text to speech has improved by leaps and bounds since the days of the robotic-sounding voices of Speak and Spell. Voices in text to speech come with a variety of accents, intonations, and some can even mimic the sounds of different moods, to help your narration content better meet your vision.
Text to speech is consistent and should be able to meet the demands of general narrative recording in a lot of training while saving time by eliminating the need to re-record.
No Need to Pay an Agency or Professional Voice Actor
Voice actors (VAs) cost money, and higher quality VAs cost more money. Often these VAs are attached to agencies who also demand a cut, which increases their price even more. If you don’t have access to someone internally who meets you needs, you may find yourself spending hundreds or thousands of dollars to record your content.
With text to speech as an option however, you no longer need to rely on professional VAs to handle the bulk of your narration. You may be able to use text to speech to record most, or even all of your content depending on the type of training you’re creating.
Save Time Re-hiring Voice Actors when Content is Refreshed
Securing voice talent initially to record for your training is challenging and time-consuming enough, but it can be even more difficult to secure that same talent again to re-record updated lines.
Some voice actors may no longer be in the business, others may be too busy to meet your deadlines, and some may have priced themselves out of your market. When using a text to speech app, you don’t have to worry about any of those issues, saving both time and money.
Keeps Learners Engaged with an Interesting, Customizable Voice
There are many AI text to speech apps on the market nowadays. Not all of them are created equal, but there’s enough variety and functionality that most people should be able to find something to match the theme and tone of their content.
Most of these apps are affordable and some come with free trials to allow you to test them out and figure out which one best suits your style. An app should save you a lot of money in the long run once you’ve found one that works for you.
Improves Content by Allowing Your Writer’s Skills to Shine
In training design, if you’re part of a smaller team then you may have to handle both writing the narrative script as well as managing the voice actors who will be speaking those lines.
This can be a large burden to handle, but through utilizing text to speech you can save a lot of time outsourcing and spend that time refining the script to make it as compelling as possible. Because you know you’re going to get a consistent effort from the AI text-to-speech algorithm, you can invest the time in improving the quality of writing to match, which is a benefit for both you and your learners.
Final Thoughts
Positive Results™ is a training development and cloud solutions company that analyses the business processes of organizations and develops training and cloud services to solve for any gaps that we find.
We believe that text to speech can help SMBs on a budget to save time and money while still creating a high-quality narration experience for their learners. While text-to-speech is never going to fully replace competent, high quality voice acting, it can provide an alternative that is still high quality enough to keep your learners engaged while allowing you to devote your resources elsewhere in the project.
If you have additional questions or need support, contact us at:
Positive Results™ Custom Business Solutions
440.499.4944
