In this video, I show you how to use WellSaid for your Adobe Captivate narration.
For several months now, I’ve been using Wellsaid for all my eLearning narration. They’ve asked me to create a video showing fellow eLearning developers how you can use this amazing tool. In this video, I’ll show you how you can recycle your unused clips and improve pronunciation.
Get Wellsaid for your next eLearning project: https://www.wellsaidlabs.com/?via=paul
Get additional help on using WellSaid: https://help.wellsaidlabs.com/pronunciation
I noticed that your fix on the YouTube pronunciation for Ava didn’t seem to work as well for Jeremy – in my opinion.
For all of the time spent tweaking a paragraph to make it sound right, it still seems like it would be faster to have simply recorded it myself. I will admit that text to speech has improved a great deal over the years but you still miss out on the changes in tone, pitch, volume, etc that would convey emotion such as sadness, excitement, anger, or empathy to name a few. It still lacks personality.
I am sure it is just a personal thing as plenty of folks like it and I am sure there are plenty of good use cases for it – but I am not yet sold on the use of text to speech – it is just too big of a big turn off for me.
My last employer insisted on text to speech because they wanted the ability to edit the courses six months, a year or more later, without the need to hire me to come back to rerecord those passages. This is where text to speech does make things easier.
One time that same employer did use volunteers from the company to join us in a recording studio to record the audio for a scenario-based elearning course. We wanted different people to play different characters in a story. We had several male and female voices. We ended up going way over budget because one of our “voice actors” couldn’t make his voice sound like he wasn’t simply reading lines off a page. He also had trouble pronouncing a keyword that was used throughout the script. In the end, we had to “fire” him and get the recording studio engineer to record his voice instead. Needless to say, that ended up costing us much more than we had originally expected.
I think there are times when a single voice makes sense and I often do those voices as well. As much as I enjoy a good Monty Python sketch, I’m not very good at doing the female voices, assuming you want the elearning to be taken seriously.
If you have an employer/client that wants the ability to edit the text somewhere down the road – wouldn’t that limit you to what is built-in to Captivate?
Otherwise wouldn’t the folks purchasing the eLearning have to maintain their own subscription to something like WellSaid and have you use it to make their stuff?
It’s okay that it’s not a solution for you. There are plenty of use cases for others as well.
At the time I was a contracted employee for the organization I worked for. I knew there was a point when I wouldn’t be there to update courses and it would be left to other employees to do this. Text to speech is not only consistent but cost-effective at replacing a sentence or two. I wasn’t using my own proprietary software to achieve the voiceovers (I used the Neospeech product included in Captivate at the time). In fact, at the time I was using the organization’s software, not my own.
Consider an overseas agency that has been asked to develop elearning for the North American audience. A North American English narrator may simply not be available at that overseas elearning developer. It’s a great option when things like accents or language get in the way.
My point is that this is another tool you can put in your elearning toolbelt. I have found that a quality text-to-speech solution offers more flexibility than only having the ability to offer just your own voice.
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