How Voice Actors Can Survive in the Time of AI

Who would you trust with your next project? The guy on the left or the one on the right?

My wife sent me the image on the left today. She said she created it with Apple’s AI image creator. I’m not familiar with it and, while I try to stay up on many things, I tend to keep myself a few generations behind the latest iPhone. But while thinking about many things about the image like: Why do people like making these images? Who does it serve? And why does Apple think I look like Vivek Ramaswamay?

I kept coming back to the same foundational idea, who would you trust to work with on your next, critical project? The artificial creation on the left or the human on the right? It also reminded of some feedback I received this year after one of my voiceover projects.

“Dan is the fastest VO talent I’ve ever worked with and his willingness to go above and beyond saved the project and made our client so happy!”

When I’m working with a client, I always return projects that are five minutes or shorter, within 24 hours. After that, things head to lightning speed. Which means if a revision request comes across my inbox, and I’m sitting in my studio and not in a live session, I drop what I’m doing and get that revision fulfilled. Why? Because I presume the project is already near, or perhaps past, its ultimate deadline. Which means they’re waiting on me.

Never Make Them Wait

If I want to stay ahead of AI, I NEVER HAVE THEM WAIT ON ME. And if it feels like they have been waiting, even 15 minutes, they will usually be greeted by several takes. All of them in the realm of what they were looking for.

Ultimately, I have to be the human who can understand a written prompt better than a voice clone and at nearly the same turnaround time. And if you’ve ever tinkered with a voice clone, you know that the tinkering part can take forever. Many times, people come to me because they’re tired of the tinkering. They want me because they know I’ll value their time and make them look good. And that is still the value proposition in voice acting. If you need random words simply uttered in a way that can be (mostly) intelligible to the human ear, there are voice clones for that.

If you need a voice that can deliver a message with any level of nuance or (gasp!) humanity, humans still have a place in the voice acting business.