3 Popular AI Tools to Make Your eLearning Voiceovers Hassle-Free

Artificial intelligence has rapidly taken over most of the tasks that humans used to do till the end of the last decade because these tasks were boring and troublesome when done excessively at a stretch. Being a background narrator for eLearning courses is one such task that was previously done by humans. But with the advancements in AI and ML technologies, these tasks are carried forward successfully to the AI tools while their quality is retained. In the coming future, it is predicted that AI will be able to carry out most of the generalized tasks, and only the highly customized ones would be executed by humans.

Read on to explore the unique features and pricing of these tools.

How AI Voiceover Tools can Make eLearning Development Easier

Using AI tools can help organizations save a lot of eLearning development and production time, cost, and unnecessary human effort. Modern AI voiceover tools use advanced deep learning technology to come up with voices that sound totally human-like, and learners don’t feel zoned out due to robotic monotonous voices. These AI tools can add emotions, accents, and personalized custom voices to your eLearning courses so that they stay true to their source and keep the employees engaged in them. There are multiple AI tools and platforms present on the internet and this blog talks about three popular ones.

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3 Popular AI Voiceover Tools

Amazon Polly

Amazon Polly is a service provided by Amazon Web Services(AWS) that either converts text-to-speech(TTS) or generates human-like speech with the help of AI. You can create wonderful applications that can talk or interact with you in your preferred language or you can simply build innovative speech-enabled products and services. Polly’s TTS uses advanced deep learning to synthesize speech that closely sounds like a human. Polly consists of 47 male and female voices in 24 languages, and more can be added in the coming future. The AI technologies used by Polly are one of the leading ones available to date, explore a few of them below.

Apart from standard TTS services, Polly also offers Neural text-to-speech(NTTS) to produce advanced and highly improved speech quality with the help of the latest machine learning technologies. Ex- a newscaster-style voice for seamless narration of news reports. You can also create a customized voice for your organization with the help of Amazon Polly Brand Voice, and that voice will be exclusive for your use only. Polly can deal with complex aspects of speech generation such as homographs, units, currencies, dates, abbreviations, and other various speech components with a human-like approach. Multiple use cases of Polly include things like content creation, product creation, software as a service, eLearning, and telephonic activities.

Pricing

Polly follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model and the cost per character conversion is very low. Standard voices are priced at $4 per 1 million speech marks requested and neural voices are priced at $16 per 1 million speech marks requested. Polly also has a pretty amazing free-tier service where 5 million characters per month are allowed for free, for the first 12 months in the case of standard voices. Whereas, for neural voices, everything else remains the same except the character count drops to 1 million per month for free.

Microsoft Azure Speech Studio

Speech studio is an AI-powered unified software service provided by Microsoft Azure that consists of various speech generation and recognition facilities such as speech transcription, TTS, speaker recognition, and speech translation. Your projects can be created without any sort of coding, and then those assets can be referenced using speech SDK, CLI, or other REST APIs. You can create amazing guided learning, storytelling, or scenario-based eLearning courses for your global audience seamlessly with the major services provided by azure speech studio listed below

1. Speech-to-text

This feature lets you quickly and accurately transcribe your speech in more than 100 languages and dialects. You can enhance the accuracy with the help of a custom speech model that can assist you with domain-specific phrases and accents. Primary specifications of this feature include –

• Real-time speech to text
• Custom speech
• Pronunciation assessment

2. Text-to-speech

Develop apps and services that enable your text to be converted into natural-sounding speech with more than 400 voices across 140 dialects and languages. You can also create a customized voice for your brand and let it inherit various speaking styles to develop an emotional approach in your speech. The primary specifications of this service consist of –

• Voice gallery
• Custom voice
• Personalized audio content creation

3. Voice assistant

You can add a conversational interface to your apps or programs that enable you to control its functions through voice inputs like custom keywords and custom commands.

Pricing –

Free

• Speech to Text – 5 audio hours free per month
• Text to Speech – 0.5 million characters free per month
• Speech translation – 5 audio hours free per month
• Speaker recognition – 10000 transactions free per month

Standard Pay-as-you-go

• Speech to text – $1 per audio hour
• Text to speech – $16 per 1M characters
• Speech translation – $2.5 per audio hour
• Speaker recognition – $5-$10 per 1000 transactions

Visit their official website for more detailed and personalized pricing models.

WellSaid Studio

WellSaid Studio is an AI tool developed by WellSaid labs to create custom voiceovers using the library of various distinct voices. You need to spend very less time adding cues and markups to your script, instead, you can instruct the AI in plain English to do the needful. Since it’s built for creative voiceovers, you don’t have to use Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) to move the perfect pitch.

You can make changes like using a different voice for your project without impacting your base schedule. You also get a feature to combine various clips before you download your whole narration. You can find the perfect voice for your type of work within minutes, from the large gallery of voices with correct and personalized pronunciations. It also has a collaborative feature where different members of your team can work on the same project. These advanced features can ease the narration and eLearning translation process for organizations to a great extent and help them create engaging eLearning courses.

Pricing –

Parting Thoughts!

AI voiceover tools and their advanced services have been a lifesaver for eLearning developers when they are working under tight deadlines. As we have already discussed, the AI voiceover tool can generate accurate speech translations from one language to another. Translations are one of the primary aspects of eLearning design but it is generally outsourced to save you time and money, under desirable conditions. Do you still have a lot of questions in mind regarding eLearning translations? If yes, this free eBook might help you out. Go, check it out now!