SELECTING THE RIGHT VOICE FOR YOUR APPLICATION how voice affects user experience and adoption

1. SELECTING THE RIGHT VOICE FOR YOUR APPLICATIONhow voice affects user experience and adoption Presented by: Matt Dubois CEO,

2. A Little About Me • Sold my first software company 21 years ago to publicly traded company. Oversee a small portfolio of 6 SaaS companies. • 3 Years with platforms in the voice / voiceover industry. • VOICEOVERS.com team behind some of the largest voice assistant products on market.

3. What You Should Expect Today • Understanding the Voice User Experience (VUX) in a Voice First World • A Voice is a reflection of personality, what personality does your app have? • Voice Characteristics and Considerations for Voice User Experience • Share past examples, discuss the reasoning behind the selection and cover trends for the future. • Voice Selection Process • A walk-through of the entire voice selection process of a major voice assistant. • Sum it up, how it works for you and your application!

4. The Voice First Era is Here! • Voice synthesis will become ubiquitous. • There are technologies currently coming on line that can recreate the inflections of the voice, identically to nearly human off of less than 60 second sample of a voice. This coupled with sophisticated AI has the potential to change how we interact and consume information.

5. Voice Synthesis in Everyday Life • Numerous large tech companies are working on not only synthesizing the voice but also emotion and the traditional narrative reads of audio books and other narrative content. • Voice assistants will increasingly respondwith matching / appropriate emotions.

6. Voice Trait Considerations • Qualities:Trustworthy, Warm, roundness, capable of conveying personality. Enthusiastic to soothing. Others can be official to sultry. In the end, it depends on the ‘profile’ of the product. • Character: The person as an artist. Their professionalism, comradery, direct-ability, creativity and efficiency. • Other Factors: Well read, well traveled, educated, a collector of stories, facts, inputs – this allows the artists to bring their WHOLE self to the performance. To evoke authenticity and presence.

7. Voice Trait Consideration: Trustworthy • University of Glasgow researchers recorded people reading a passage and played just the word “hello” from those readings to other volunteers, who rated the voices on personality traits like trustworthiness and dominance. While the study couldn’t verify how accurate the ratings were, the researchers found that most people rated the voices similarly. For instance, men who raised their pitches were seen as more trustworthy, while women whose voices went up at the end of a word were seen as less trustworthy.

8. Keep in Mind… • Do it Right: It’s not just about selecting the RIGHT voice but the RIGHT person/personality, know the difference. • Personality > Voice: Voiceover AI teams have entire personality divisions. These are carefully crafted personas. • Criticisms:Female-centric, old-school, subservient ‘secretary’. There is a movement to seek gender-neutral voices.

9. Current Methods and Processes • The current process of text-to-speech (TTS) recording is an exceptionally time consuming process requiring the skills of precise yet high volume reading abilities. The creation of assistants such as Siri and Alexa are ongoing gigs with initial records in the months of material supplemented annually with copious hours of new materials. • Why this is important for Voice Synthesis and VUX?

10. Where to Start • Voice selection is sophisticated, technology companies work off of data. They know what types of voices, pitch, tone, sex, etc. are algorithmically most appealing, compelling, impactful. Next step, applying that data. • Voice selection is based on a variety of desired outcomes and emotional hooks from target age, demo and socio graphic backgrounds, types of content and on…

11. Step One • Identify User Audience. Each persona is a collective image of a representative of a group of app audience. Personas help us to understand better user needs and each of them has a certain set of phrases, based on behavioral patterns.

12. Step Two • Create a Character. We should strive to make conversation with the app as similar as a regular talk with a real person. For this, the user should form the image of the person with whom he communicates. You can do this by inventing a character. We add a name, skills, brief biography, character, sometimes even a graphical representation and, of course, voice.

13. Step Three • Write Examples of Dialogues. We know who our users are, we know what functionality they want, we know from whose face we speak to users. It’s time to write examples of dialogs between the user and the application for each script.

14. Voice Selection Process • Audition Voice Talent, start with round of 100 typical auditions using standardized copy, a few pages. • Create a short-list of 25 that “feel right” and apply research data. • Select 8 Voice Talent for meetings with higher level executives, live reads, paid auditions.

15. Voice Selection Process • Collect phonemes; classic literature, home assistant sentences and random sentences from the internet. • These are utilized to run MVP demos (minimum viable product) through the actual interfaces/devices/program.

16. Voice Selection Process • Final 2… 150 hours of TTS material. • Built betas versions and listen to what sounds more ‘natural’.

17. Wrapping It Up! • At the end of the day, whether you natively use voice synthesis or live voice actors for your application, the primary goal is to sound like a real person and convey the emotions of a real person. Your goal is to be as close to a natural human being as possible. • Making users believe they are speaking with a real human voice will always be the benchmark for the success, so it is important to understand the relationship of voice and personality, coupled with the process of applying data to the characteristics of voice.

18. You can download this presentation at: https://voiceovers.com/voice19 Or contact me:matt@voiceovers.com