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It’s getting frothy out there.

The number of voice actors in a rabid panic over AI in the industry is reaching a head, with social media brimming with daily posts on the topic, despite very little real world evidence of synthetic voices impacting the bottom line of working pros, or even amateurs for that matter.

There’s a supposition among the masses that because the technology is improving, its ascension is inevitable, and that by definition it will supplant human voice actors to a highly disruptive degree. It’s easy to get caught up in the terror, but worst-case scenarios….heck, even moderately disruptive scenarios….are based on a lot of assumptions that very well may not hold up in the real world.

Now, there’s no question that numerous companies and platforms want AI voiceover to be an Earth-shattering thing. And, inevitably, we are going to start seeing even well-known casting platforms offer AI voices against or alongside their human talent. Many voice actors are busy creating their own voice clones which they expect to make available through their websites, casting platforms, or through the platforms of the companies creating these artificial voices for them. But this assumes that the demand will be present, and substantial.

It seems equally likely that AI voices will instead be received much the same way that those paid listings at the top of Google are. If you’re like most people I know, you skip right past those until you get to the organic results, right? Why? Because you know they are inauthentic. Paid for and driven by an algorithm, and not a legitimate reflection of the intent of your search. For most people that’s just reflex now, which is why buying search terms has become a loser’s game in most industries.

I believe we are dramatically underestimating the reflexive human nature to reject that which is inauthentic when it comes to voice clones and other synthetic voices. EVEN IF THEY ARE AMAZING, (and I’ve still yet to hear one that doesn’t break down into unnatural speech after a minute or so,) if they are listed against human talent on a casting platform, human nature will be to skip over them for the real thing.

We are being inundated with daily reports of the impending AI takeover of so many professions and walks of life. But is it actually happening? Take ChatGPT for example. Fun and interesting, sure, but assuming it will be more than just a toy requires multiple leaps of faith, as this article by The New Republic’s Alex Shephard points out: https://newrepublic.com/article/170855/artificial-intelligence-chatgpt-hype-kissinger

It may in fact turn out to be nothing more than a curiosity.

The potential impact of this technology is predicated on a tremendous number of very aspirational assumptions about demand. These are not a fait accompli by any stretch of the imagination. Corporations may be avaricious and cynical, but as a species human beings are not. We collectively and instinctively understand when something is fake, and we reflexively reject fake things.

I frequently ask my clients if they are considering or would consider replacing me with a synthetic voice. The overwhelming majority reply with a flat out “no.” Are they all being honest or contemplating all possible scenarios? Probably not. But I’ve yet to see this technology make even a marginal impact on the growth of my business. My agents are pushing out more auditions than ever. My manager is out there slaying it. Production companies and ad agencies are still hiring directly every day. And there’s more volume on P2P sites than ever. If the voiceover singularity is rapidly approaching, it’s awfully hard to tell.

It’s that time of year again. To make a complete jackass of myself with predictions for the New Year in areas that I have no business prognosticating about. I can’t wait!

First, let’s revisit how I did this time last year….

NAILED IT, CLOSE, OR MOSTLY RIGHT

Everyone will continue to panic about AI yet will be shocked at year’s end when most working talent have earned more than the year before. (This will differ from one talent to the next, but I think we can all agree that the AIpocalypse did not happen in 2022.)

Sports prognosticators will have mouths agape as the Cincinnati Bengals upset the Green Bay Packers in the Super Bowl. (Pretty darn close on this one.)

VO Atlanta will kick off a rocking 2022 full of live, in-person voiceover conferences that will fuel good spirits and revived friendships throughout the year. (Nailed it.)

The rapid spread of Omicron will herald a clearer-than-expected end to the pandemic, and by the end of March the world will look a lot more like 2019 than anyone would have expected. (Ish….certainly closer to 2019 than 2020.)

Commercials will become more and more geo-targeted, with different VOs attached to the same copy in different regions becoming more common. (Continuing to move in this direction.)

More and more VOs will see the light that snark and conflict on social media isn’t a good look, regardless of who is right. (It took a minute, but in the last six months it feels like everyone’s taken a deep breath.)

2022 will be the year of the anti-trend in casting…..with casting specs finding a happy medium between reads that have been trending hard for the last two years and more classical approaches. (This feels like a nailed-it.)

The Democratic Party will lose the House but retain the Senate. (I’m not saying CNN needs more political analysts, but…..)

MEH….

The expected party summer of 2021 will actually happen in 2022, leading to a short but intense economic boom. Travel stocks will soar starting in February. (I was right on the stock tip, though inflation quickly rendered both that and the rest of this prediction less than accurate.

Jenn Henry will wear a tiara in public at a major industry event. (I don’t think this ACTUALLY happened, but you have to admit you thought it would too.)

We will take a deep breath and remember that we have more in common as human beings than we do things to fight over. (There’s an argument to be made that this happened in the USA. The rest of the world, not so much.)

WELL, SHIT….

Despite saber-rattling and skirmishes, neither Ukraine nor Taiwan will be invaded in 2022. (At least when I’m wrong I don’t half-ass it….I’m COMPLETELY wrong.)

There will be two or more dramatic mergers or acquisitions in the agency and management world. (I still think this is coming, but it was a swing and a miss in 2022.)

Emmanuel Macron will unexpectedly lose the French Presidency. (Meanwhile, France24 has rejected my application for a political analyst spot on THAT network.)

 

Well, that was somewhat better than I remembered, save for the small oversight of not seeing a shooting war on Europe’s doorstep happening. Let’s see what I’ve got for 2023:

 

INDUSTRY: I’m gonna start by renewing that prediction of major agencies merging in the new year.

WORLD: Football first. Let’s go with the shocker again. Tom Brady stuns the world by taking a Buccaneers team with a losing regular season record into the postseason and turning on that Brady magic en-route to a final-drive Super Bowl win over the bad luck Bengals.

INDUSTRY: Economic conditions will reduce the number of new entrants into the business by forcing many VO-curious people to go back into the mainstream labor market. This will also lead to somewhat less competition at the lower-end of the VO marketplace, potentially forcing lower-end buyers to up their budgets.

WORLD: There will be a global recession in 2023. In the USA it will be mild to moderate, and largely over by the end of 2023. Europe and other parts of the world may feel it more severely. Inflation will come to a conclusive end by the end of 2023. Markets will start the year off bumpy and uneven, but build momentum by late summer and finish the year strong.

INDUSTRY: AI will continue to be a major discussion point, but will continue to have little impact on the average full-time VO. However, AI will inform the continued improvement of software aides and emulation technology for voice actors, making many parts of our jobs considerably easier.

WORLD: Unpopular opinion: The death of cryptocurrency will prove to have been greatly exaggerated. With more focus on regulation in the wake of the FTX scandal, and less investor enthusiasm for speculative altcoins and NFTs, more stable cryptocurrencies will rally from a market bottom and the entire space will double in value in 2023.

INDUSTRY: A substantial divide will open up with regard to how you use your demos. Agents, managers, ad agencies, production companies and other brick and mortar buyers will still demand the traditional one to two minute long demo reel. Meanwhile, online casting platforms and their increasingly complex algorithms will mean that you will need more and more fully-produced single-read samples demonstrating extremely specific deliveries. I’m in the process of creating as many as a thousand such samples for myself in order to get ahead of Voice123’s new algorithm change.

WORLD: Both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will no longer be the leaders of their respective countries one year from today.

INDUSTRY: The union will more actively engage the voiceover community in 2023, and will make inroads into reclaiming parts of the industry that have moved away from it.

WORLD: Donald Trump will either be indicted, or quietly cut a deal with the government to agree to retreat from the public scene in exchange for avoiding charges.

INDUSTRY: The affectless, meh, don’t care, bored xanax read will have some time left to run, but as the economy turns brighter towards the end of 2023, the Holidays will see a return of brighter reads with more ‘up’ and energy, and by summer 2024 it will be cool to smile and sell a little bit again. Maybe. I hope.

WORLD: The frontrunners for the 2024 presidential election one year from today will still be Joe Biden and Ron DeSantis.

INDUSTRY: 2023 will be a running party for voice actors, with the conference scene back to being packed and in-person, and the social calendar once again being completely full….it’s time to get out and find your tribe!

WORLD: After so many years of turmoil, new moderate regimes in Russia and China will pull back from the brink, and politics in America will continue its slow move toward the center. In the end, the trend will be towards peace and compromise.

 

 

 

 

 

Five thoughts for the start of your voiceover week.

1.) Beware siloed advice in the voiceover business. When trying to figure out what advice and expertise is actionable for your VO business, consume a broad sample of opinions. It can be attention grabbing for an industry service provider or expert to espouse opinions that are disruptive or challenge the status quo. Sometimes those perspectives are indeed valuable new insights, but just as often they are outliers and could do your business more harm than good. What worked for one marketing superstar may not apply to you. What one production company executive took into consideration when hiring talent doesn’t necessarily apply to other buyers. What one agent looks for in a roster prospect may be completely different than the majority. Conventional wisdom needs shaking up from time to time, but it didn’t become conventional wisdom by accident.

 

2.) Give yourself a break. With the exception of certain commercial accounts and standard golden-handcuffs stuff like network promo, The Most Wonderful Time of the Year is also often the slowest time of the year for voiceover. If you’re feeling burned out, now’s a great time to consider giving yourself a break.

 

3.) Give agents a break. Got shiny new demos or a recent high-profile booking that you want to leverage into new agency representation? Great! Just keep in mind that agents take holiday breaks, too, and just like the rest of us they tend to be logy with seasonal overindulgence this time of year. Hold fire until late January for best results if you’re thinking of submitting for rep.

 

4.) Prepping for 2023. Now, however, is a good time to be prepping your VO action plan for 2023. What worked for your business this year? What didn’t? Take stock, and begin creating a roadmap to improve upon what worked and pivot from what didn’t in the New Year, so you can hit the ground running when things start heating up in January.

 

5.) The robots can’t even draw fingers. In case you’re still freaking out about AI in voiceover, check out the Lensa AI portrait craze that has swept social media recently. Controversy over how it appropriates art from the internet aside, my takeaway? The thing can’t even render hands correctly. When it tries they look like the aftermath of an industrial accident. Lensa AI strikes me as a preview of where artificial intelligence VO and synthetic voices will  land: Ooh, that’s fun! Now let’s go hire a pro to do it right.

The metaverse.

Depending on your perspective, it is either the next revolution in human interaction, or a Mark Zuckerberg fever dream likely to amount to nothing more than a fistful of Shiba Inu Coin. Nevertheless, serious corporations, with serious money, are getting on the bandwagon. Facebook and Microsoft are early leaders, but the metaverse has piqued the interest of retail brands, gaming businesses, and now academic institutions are starting to take notice. (https://theconversation.com/facebook-the-metaverse-and-the-monetisation-of-higher-education-171036)

If you’re a voice actor who works in E-Learning, you’ll already have noticed the trend towards gamified, interactive, and personality-driven content. While there is still quite a lot of old-school formal E-Learning narration out there, the shift towards more creative content is impossible to ignore.

The advent of the metaverse will only accelerate this trend.  Imagine an academic E-Learning program in which students come to a virtual classroom or auditorium, and you’re the professor. Except you’ve pre-recorded the core material, and hundreds of possible responses to student questions and interactions which will be delivered responsively in real time by AI. Or training narration for surgeons where you walk them through a fully-immersed simulation of an operation, with your character wearing the skin of a senior colleague. Even something as boring as corporate onboarding may take pace in the metaverse in the future, with a smart-alec trainer voiced by an actor trying to keep it real with the new hires.

If you’re worried that AI will take some of these jobs, well, it will. But probably fewer than you think. Why? Character-driven content requires acting, and at its best AI can only hope to be as good as we are, never better. Low budget projects will migrate towards AI, but major brands and institutions that are less cost-sensitive will want the quality that only a real VO can provide.

What does this all mean for voice actors who play or want to play in E-Learning? Like so much else in VO, it’s time to sharpen your acting skills. If the metaverse truly takes off, E-Learning will start to resemble commercial, animation, video game, and other genres that have gone considerably more conversational. The days of “click next to move to the next slide,” might finally be numbered.

Are you ready?

In an annual act of self-immolation guaranteed to make me look like a moron, it’s time for predictions for 2022, both for the VO industry and the world at large.

Behold…..

INDUSTRY: Everyone will continue to panic about AI yet will be shocked at year’s end when most working talent have earned more than the year before.

THE WORLD: Sports prognosticators will have mouths agape as the Cincinnati Bengals upset the Green Bay Packers in the Super Bowl.

INDUSTRY: VO Atlanta will kick off a rocking 2022 full of live, in-person voiceover conferences that will fuel good spirits and revived friendships throughout the year.

THE WORLD: The rapid spread of Omicron will herald a clearer-than-expected end to the pandemic, and by the end of March the world will look a lot more like 2019 than anyone would have expected.

INDUSTRY: Commercials will become more and more geo-targeted, with different VOs attached to the same copy in different regions becoming more common.

THE WORLD: The expected party summer of 2021 will actually happen in 2022, leading to a short but intense economic boom. Travel stocks will soar starting in February.

INDUSTRY: More and more VOs will see the light that snark and conflict on social media isn’t a good look, regardless of who is right.

THE WORLD: Despite saber-rattling and skirmishes, neither the Ukraine nor Taiwan will be invaded in 2022.

INDUSTRY: 2022 will be the year of the anti-trend in casting…..with casting specs finding a happy medium between reads that have been trending hard for the last two years and more classical approaches.

THE WORLD: The Democratic Party will lose the House but retain the Senate.

INDUSTRY: There will be two or more dramatic mergers or acquisitions in the agency and management world.

THE WORLD: Emmanuel Macron will unexpectedly lose the French Presidency.

INDUSTRY: Jenn Henry will wear a tiara in public at a major industry event.

THE WORLD: Will take a deep breath and remember that we have more in common as human beings than we do things to fight over.

 

Here’s to a happy and successful 2022 for all of you!