Professional voiceover services can be divided into five categories:
1. Commercial Voiceover — This includes adverts on the radio and podcasts, as well as commercials on television and over-the-top (OTT) and internet videos. These usually involve a spokesperson or character promoting a product or service to customers or corporations.
2. Storytelling Technical videos, documentary, online tutorials, explainer videos, or business training materials all require voiceover. The voiceover talent in these projects tells the audience a story or takes them through certain tasks, frequently with the help of animation or recorded footage.
3. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) / Voice Prompts / Telephony – Any voice-based technology, such as digital assistants (such as Siri, Alexa), in-app voice interface, PA systems (such as at the airport), as well as phone trees, falls under this category (think: on-hold messaging). It’s a very technical type of voiceover work.
Do you want to create a video for your enterprise? I realize you’re in need of an excellent voice-over. Why don’t you go with a standard voice over company? But now comes the conundrum of choose which supplier to use. Which one will work best for educational, introductory, and product review videos? Google text-to-speech as well as other technologies appears to be tedious. Those aren’t even natural! Let’s see how it goes! Azuni Voice is a good option for making the finest instanttext to speech audios for your business.
Voice over for this video was created by an Azuni Voice Bot
In this day and age, it’s not a smart idea to create your voice-over while squandering hours editing or correcting. So, if you really want your company to grow, an amazing yet natural voice-over is required to make the video more appealing and engage consumers more with the material. Amazon Polly, Natural reader, as well as voice dream reader are a few examples of common text-to-speech programs. But we constantly want the finest. Azuni Voice will be the greatest option for you!
For years, brands have been encouraged to ‘think like publishers.’ This has meant that many companies have jumped into creating editorial calendars and opted into brand storytelling. However, the times are changing. Now, for those who wish to emulate a publisher’s approach to content creation, there’s another major component to account for: audio.
For marketers, audio offers an engaging form of content, one that can help you truly stand out. Here, we’ll dive into why audio content is becoming a more popular form of media enrichment for some of the world’s best publications, and how your brand can take advantage.
Turn Your Blog Articles into Podcasts or Audio Blogs
Most brands that identify as storytellers will also have a company blog. Complementing your existing posts with a narrated audio file can offer a huge asset.
If you think about it from the audience’s perspective, many of us are reading while we’re working. Maybe we’re conducting industry research, or giving our brains a break by visiting our favorite blog. But, how much reading do you get through before you’re interrupted?
In most occupations, there are times throughout the day where we are a little distracted. Just look at how many tabs are open on your browser right now. How many of them did you abandon?
Chances are a lot.
Here are a few other reasons why audio content is a great supplement to your overall content mix.
Audio Messages Can Be Delivered Directly to Multi-Taskers
Further to the point above, audio content is easy for audiences to throw on in the background while they work away at other tasks, like data entry, processing lines of code, driving their truck around the worksite and more.
Reading articles, on the other hand, is an activity that requires total focus. By incorporating an audio player into your blog post or website, you get the best of both worlds – a medium that multi-taskers can enjoy, as well as the ability to serve up your carefully crafted content in its entirety.
Audio Content Can Be Served Up as a Podcast, Offering You a New Way to Get Discovered
If you love re-purposing content, you know that the practice is one way to work smarter and not harder. The articles that you already have, on your blog or through your company publications are essentially scripts, that you can use to create an audio version.
After you’ve recorded your audio blog, not only can you embed the content on your website, you can also serve it up through other distribution channels as a podcast.
Think how much farther your content could go if it was syndicated and distributed through Apple iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and Spotify? Even Amazon is getting into the podcast game. By creating an audio version and submitting your podcast, you’re able to expose your content to new audiences and earn new fans.
Audio Offers a Richer, More Personal Experience with Your Content and Brand
Humans learn how to communicate verbally long before we ever learn to read. Listening to someone’s voice taps into something primal in us, and paints a picture that only the human voice can.
When you enrich the content experience with audio, you stand to draw audiences closer to your brand. Think of the last time you listened to someone tell you a great story, or the last time someone personally helped you by walking you through a challenge.
This is not to slight the written word, which is incredibly powerful, but vocal interactions are much more personal than a written article on it’s own, even if it covers the same subject matter, or holds the same entertaining or educational information.
With audio, you deliver the richness of tone, inflection, emotion, and personality, all of which aren’t as easily gleaned from words on a page.
Lastly, these audio files allow you to express your brand voice in a very literal way… And isn’t that just magical?
With all factors considered, it’s clear that audio offers advantages to brand marketers who are looking to carve out space in a saturated market. Not only are audiences open to audio content, but they’re also demanding it, as well as enabling their homes, cars, cell phones and more to distribute audio content, on-demand.
Will you start producing audio versions of your content?
When it comes to audiobooks, book lovers have varied opinions on its benefits in comparison to the conventional reading of books. Some say it is same as reading, while other differs and believes that they are a lazy alternative!
However, regardless of the opinions, audiobooks have found their way into the hearts of many book lovers and their popularity is just increasing with time.
And why not? There are many recognized benefits of audiobooks that make them suitable for many situations. For instance, you can listen to audiobooks while driving, cleaning, walking, etc. and save a good amount of time.
You can’t do that while reading, can you?
I’m not saying audiobooks are better than reading. What I mean is that both have their own importance and we should acknowledge and accept them for the great values they bestow upon us.
Here are some of the key benefits of listening to audiobooks:
It improves pronunciation and fluency
Listening to audiobooks improves your reading and speaking accuracy and fluency. While the narrator(s) narrates the book, you can notice and learn the way he/she is pronouncing different words.
Not only that, but you can also notice his reading speed, his pauses, stresses, and intonations, which are very crucial in having a good fluency and command over any language.
Helps to improve time management
One of the most notable benefits of audiobooks is that you can save a good amount of time by multitasking. You can continue listening to your audiobook if the other tasks do not require much of your attention.
Many people love listening to audiobooks in gym, or while going for a walk, or while carrying out other daily commute be it driving, cooking, cleaning, or even bathing.
It improves focus and attention span
While listening to an audiobook, you need to pay attention to what the narrator is trying to convey to you. And you will have to maintain that attention throughout the narration.
It is very easy to get lost once you are distracted while listening to audiobooks. And unlike reading books, you will find it difficult in going back and re-listening it again. So it is important that you are focused and you don’t let yourself distract.
So, these were some of the key benefits of audiobooks. There are many more that you will experience yourself once you start listening to audiobooks.
If you haven’t tried audiobooks yet, I would highly recommend you to go for it and give it a try.
Jenna Homen works on all things related to social media and the Libro.fm community. When not reading and listening to books, she is probably painting or hiking.
Social distancing and self-isolation in the face of coronavirus can take a toll on our mental health. Fortunately, audiobooks are a helpful tool to combat negative thoughts and feelings.
Here are 8 ways audiobooks can boost your emotional and physical health—all you need to do is press play. Need some listening inspiration? Check out bookseller-recommended audiobooks.
Audiobooks Build Crucial Listening Skills for Children
According to the Audio Publishers Association, audiobooks help “build and enhance vital literacy skills such as fluency, vocabulary, language acquisition, pronunciation, phonemic awareness, and comprehension—skills that often boost reading scores.” Need some audiobook recommendations for kids? Head to the Kids page.
Audiobooks have the power to boost our moods and disrupt negative thinking patterns. Psychology Today notes that for “those of us prone to anxiety and depression . . . listening to someone else read aloud can help by replacing negative thoughts with something else.”
Audiobooks Have the Same Benefits of Reading
Don’t let anyone tell you that listening to audiobooks is cheating. Discover noted that “in a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers from the Gallant Lab at UC Berkeley scanned the brains of nine participants while they read and listened. . . Looking at the brain scans and data analysis, the researchers saw that the stories stimulated the same cognitive and emotional areas, regardless of their medium.”
The blue light from screens is a disruption to our circadian rhythm, which makes nodding off at night difficult. Listening to an audiobook allows your eyes and mind to relax while ushering in a good night of sleep.
Being able to work our brain and read books while doing tasks like driving, cleaning, or exercising is a win-win—and allows less satisfying chores to become more enjoyable, reducing stress.
Audiobooks Help Build Literacy Skills
The Audio Publishers Association notes that “readers with learning disabilities and English Language Learners who listen to audiobooks demonstrate increased literacy skills and reading ability.”
Audiobooks Immerse You in Another World
Psychology Today cites audio as “one of the most intimate forms of media—listeners work together with the narrator and author to create mental pictures of situations and characters. Audiobooks can captivate the imagination, allowing listeners to create a whole world at once within and outside themselves.” Being able to escape our daily worries is a powerful tool that we can easily tap into through the wonder of audiobooks. (P. S. Need tips on making a cozy space for reading and listening? Check out this post on how to create the perfect book nook.)
