How good does a voice have to be for The Association to put it in a client’s vehicle navigation system?
Pretty good. In fact, when you consider some people will hear our voice talent more than their significant other, it really demands a careful selection process.
We apply eleven criteria when we’re casting for a voice. These are the voice characteristics on our selection grid:
- Is it a voice you’d like to listen to every day?
- Does the voice talent read the line fast enough for you to make a quick maneuver on the freeway but not so fast that you can’t understand her?
- Does the voice talent sound like she’s sincerely interested in your safety and not just doing a job?
- Is her voice warm yet businesslike?
- Is the “energy level” in her voice engaging to you and not abrasive or too withdrawn?
- Does the voice talent sound like she’s taking responsibility for you and the car’s safety?
- Does she sound knowledgeable? Someone you would follow in a crisis?
- Is her diction and enunciation perfect?
- Does she have “class” (without being snobby)?
- Is she pleasant and trustworthy or does she talk like a robot?
- The last step we take is to look into their private lives a bit. Are they stable professionals who will be available to us exclusively for years to come or will they take off onto another career and leave Los Angeles? This is important because we often build the navigation computer’s voice files over decades and we must have the voice talent’s commitment to work with us over the long haul.
These are the criteria we apply to all our voice talent. This is the process that’s produced six sigma quality files for years. (We use the Neumann U87 microphone, exclusively, but we’ll talk more about the signal path in a later blog.)
We provide voice files in whatever language you need because we’re located in Hollywood, which attracts a large pool of talent to record voices for films to be released overseas. Plus, we have great international connections and we can find voice talent for virtually any car or telematic application: French Canadian, Spanish, German, Portuguese, American, British, North American Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Farsi, Hebrew, Finnish, Swedish and on and on.
If you’d like to hear an example of one of our voice talent go to http://www.theassociation.tv/voice.php and click on “Our Seamless Voice Files”. Donna exemplifies a voice that scored highest in all eleven criteria. Can you guess which car her voice went in? We try to match the “beingness” of the voice to the car it will be in. Let us know how we did.Comment below with your guess!