A Guide to Choosing the Right Voiceover for E-Learning

Using voiceovers can enhance both the user experience and the company's return on investment. But how can you create the best voiceover?

Best Ways to Create Voiceovers

Before we start with the suggestions, let's pause for a moment and think about these moments:

• A video you really enjoyed watching
• The lectures of a professor you enjoyed listening to during your university years
• A conference where you were very impressed by the speaker's presentation

When you reflect on these moments, you'll see that the way the speaker delivers the speech or message greatly affects your experience. This also applies to e-learning modules. When planning training, you should first consider whether to use voiceovers. Using voiceovers improves the overall user experience and increases the return on the company's investment in training.

When to Use Voiceovers?

Some training may not require audio or may be designed without any audio for various reasons. However, using audio makes learning more memorable and engaging. Therefore, it is recommended to use audio in training. You can use voiceovers in e-learning in the following scenarios:

• Reflecting the conversation between characters
• Using it as support in the section where the concept in the training is explained, showing illustrations or animations
• Presenting the content through a presenter to make the training engaging

How to Create a Voiceover

So, how can you create the best voiceover? Some of the most common methods are:

• Text-to-speech services
• Software trained on human voices to obtain AI voices
• In-house resources
• Professional voiceover artists to obtain studio-quality output

The audio level and the required voiceover quality depend on your corporate goals and the objectives of the e-learning. Sometimes using a voiceover created by converting text to speech may do the trick. However, if you are creating e-learning for a different institution and want to ensure a professional product, you should use a professional human voiceover artist. If the training is a bit complex or you want to make sure that your audience really understands and relates to the materials, you may need to use more audio components to help engage users, reduce overall training time, and increase satisfaction.

So what is the best choice for you? This depends on many variables. These variables can be very different things such as budget, audience requirements, training content. Now let's take a look at the pros and cons of different audio options.

Voiceover Creation Options

Text-to-Speech

• Benefits
  • Can even be used for free
  • It is convenient
  • Easy to use

• Disadvantages
  • Mechanical sound
  • Can be annoying and distracting after a while

• When to Use
  • When the budget is very limited
  • To record short strategic sentences
  • For prototype versions of training

AI-Based Audio

• Benefits
  • Can mimic human voice and intonation to a better degree
  • Easy to update

• Disadvantages
  • Usually requires a separate subscription
  • Requires a separate workflow

• When to Use
  • When you want to strike a balance between budget and quality
  • In limited narration situations (can become monotonous when listened to for longer)
  • When the scenario is not very emotional

Recording Audio with In-House Resources

• Benefits
  • You use the existing talents in the company
  • You reduce costs

• Disadvantages
  • Quality can be quite variable depending on the equipment available
  • You take the people whose voices you will benefit from away from their full-time roles
  • It can be difficult to update the audio if the person employing leaves the company

• When to Use
  • In cases where you need to add the voice of authority figures such as expert commentary
  • In cases where you need to use high-quality recording