Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with David Ciccarelli, CEO & Co-Founder of Voices.com:
Q: For those who haven’t heard of it, what is the best way to describe Voices.com?
A: Voices.com is an online marketplace. We connect business clients, mostly creative professionals at advertising agencies and video production companies with voice actors. Our voice actors are very talented. They not only have great voices that bring projects to life, but also work out of home recording studios. This means that our clients have immediate access to a global network of hundreds of thousands of voice actors who speak over 100 accents languages.
Now, if you’re wondering why would I hire a voice actor, let me offer some examples. Most people traditionally think of radio and TV commercials, however that work only makes up about ten to fifteen percent of the market. If you consider radio and TV commercials to be broadcast work, then the other eighty-five percent of the work is non-broadcast. Non-broadcast work encompassed everything from Internet videos, videos for social media and product demonstration videos. Beyond video, consider the other ways that a business might work with a voice talent, such as for a phone system, podcast and corporate training material. It’s a fascinating industry that touches so many others.
Q: How exactly does your service work?
A: For our business clients, there are a few ways to find the perfect voice for your project. Once you’ve signed up for free, you can search the marketplace by language needed, gender, age range and area of expertise. Our search results feature an audio player so you can immediately hear what the voice actor sounds like. You can even click through to actors’ profile where you’d read their biographical information, studio equipment and client testimonials. If you like what you hear and see, you can invite the voice actor to a job. That leads me to arguably the faster and even better way our service works.
Instead of searching and hunting to find the right yourself, you can post a job. It’s also free to post a job. When posting a job, you give it a title, name the category (Internet video, educational, videogame etc…) and then describe your project. We guide you through the process of picking the language you need, the preferred gender of voice as well as other artistic direction. If you have a script, you can attach that too. To finish off your job posting, we ask for your budget range ($250-$500) and your project deadline.
Next is where the magic comes in. We automatically match your job posting and with the most qualified voice actors who meet your specific needs. Within a matter of hours, you’ll have a dozen or so voice actors replying to your job. They’ll reply with an audition so you can hear exactly how your script will sound along with their quote for the job. Each talent sets their own price that includes our platform fee. Once you’ve listened to the actors and found the perfect voice, simply click “Hire” and you’ll be directed to a credit card form. Payment is made up front which books the actor for the job and gives them confidence they will get paid for a job well done. Your audio files will be made available for download from our website. Once you’ve received the finished work, you can leave a rating and review for the actor. The entire process can take a little as a few hours to a couple of days depending on the size of the project.
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Q: Voices.com offers 2 service level options; could you tell us something more about those?
A: Sure, the two service levels are best described as self-service, meaning you do it yourself just like I described above, or full service, meaning we do it for you. While most jobs are fairly straight-forward such as a brief video or short audio ads, there are times when a corporate client comes to us with a sizable project such as a voice-over for corporate training videos in a dozen languages. In those cases, there are a lot of moving parts and generally, they appreciate the assistance of a Project Manager. We quote those on a project-by-project basis and the price is entirely dependent upon the complexity. In most cases, business owners, marketing managers and creative producers can use our website to search for, audition and hire a professional voice actor on their own with ease.
Q: What are your best features?
A: As a Co-Founder, I’m biased here, however I would suggest that our the VoiceMatch technology is quite powerful. It eliminates so much time in curating a list of voice actors you might want to work with an then reaching out to them individually. Instead, simply post a job and let the technology, which we refer to as a recommendation engine, invite talent for you. The talent also see how well matched they are for a given job which gives them a better idea of how likely they are to land the gig. It’s a helpful feature for both sides of the marketplace.
After VoiceMatch, the payment process is a feature that comes up often as a differentiator. We call this feature SurePay and it’s currently patent-pending. SurePay is an escrow service that holds the client’s payment in a neutral bank account until they are happy with the delivered audio files. Once they are satisfied, we release payment to the voice actor for the completed work. Facilitating both the connection as well as the payment are core to our platform and what we hear as being the most helpful features for our customers.
Q: Can anyone have voice acting career? What does it take?
A: Voice acting is one of those professionals that looks, and sounds easy, however to do it well you need more than a great voice. Voice acting is acting without the benefits of being on-camera. You need to deliver a performance entirely through your voice. So, for those considering a career in voice acting, I’d recommend exploring acting classes or improv classes. Taking a step further, working with a voice-over coach is also a step we advocate. Many voice-over coaches will prepare you to record your first voice-over demo. Your demo, a thirty to sixty second highlight reel showing your capabilities and vocal range is a critical piece of marketing collateral. All voice actors have at least one demo, usually a commercial demo, however more experienced voice actors recognize they can expand their job opportunities by having demos in a number of work areas such as audiobooks, educational content, podcasts, videogames or cartoon characters.
Truth be told, much of the work of a voice actor is doing auditions. In a survey we sent out last year, we uncovered that our most active and successful voice actors do ten to fifteen auditions per day. Those auditions lead to work and ultimately to satisfied and returning clients.
For those looking to take the first step, we wrote a comprehensive blog article called Getting Started in Voice Acting that has links out to other important areas. That’s a great place to start.
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Q: What can we expect from your company in the future?
A: One of the areas of technology we’re most interested in, and tracking closely, is the whole area of voice assistants, such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri. Beyond smart speakers, voice assistants are getting embedded into smartphones, laptops and cars not to mention home appliances. Our world is becoming voice activated before our eyes, and ears.
We even introduced a new area of expertise for our voice actors to showcase voice assistant work so they can demonstrate to marketers and voice technology developers previous work they’ve done in this area.
Over the last six months, we collaborated with Voicebot.ai to conduct research on how marketers are using voice applications as a marketing channel. The results are all available free in a 30-page market research report at Voicebot.ai.
The next couple of years will be quite interesting as we see voice technology becoming more prevalent in our day-to-day lives.
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