Robotic Voice for YouTube

[Ned Storm]

YouTube is a great way to get exposure for your business by posting (hopefully) viral videos. This is great if you have acting skills so you look and sound good in the video.

But if you don't what do you do?

You can capture the screen of your computer and narrate what you are doing. But if your voice sounds bad and you tend to make many mistakes, then you are going to struggle.

You could hire somebody but that could be expensive.

I posted a video with me talking on YouTube and I got plenty of negative feedback regarding my voice, so I decided to find another solution.

The solution I came up with is to use a robotic voice from a text to speech software. This is not a new idea since we had Max Headroom years ago.

To check out one of the best quality solutions go to: ivona.com But, unfortunately, after downloading their demo, the license terms said you are not to publish the synthesized speech in public places. Also, you will have to pay to use this commercially.

Later, I discovered espeak which is free software and can generate some reasonably good sounding speech from text when you play around with the options (best from the command line).

I haven't uploaded anything to YouTube yet using this idea but hope to do so in the near future.