Looking for a new way to freshen up your podcast or audio content to #getnoticed?

Hello and welcome to today's episode. Now, you might have heard a different voice on the intro today, and that's because I decided for a little bit of a freshen up. The challenge was I couldn't find anyone that was willing to do this talk over for me, just for 20 seconds. It was too short for anybody really to be interested. Wasn't enough money. So what I've done is I've turned to a platform called Now Talkia. T A L K I D A dot com is a platform where you can make text into audio just by typing it in. And you can create amazing sounding voiceovers, as I'm going to show you, not just in your own language, but it actually translates those languages and puts them into other languages for you. So if you have a website, for example, you want multilingual content, all from one original source language, this will do that for you. So toolkit.com is a program that's available on subscription and you can use this where you want to create voiceovers that sound like real humans, or at least close enough. So it's great for video sales letters, for examples, for educational videos, for marketing videos, training videos, and even audiobooks. I've used it, for example, for even recording whole sessions of this show when for whatever reason, I didn't have the time or the energy to do it myself. Now, what's also cool is that you can use talkio on the Internet. And so what can happen is that your files are all stored in the cloud and if you have a VA like I do, for example, you can send them the text and they can create the sound for you, the audio voices for you. And that's what I did with Alex in the Philippines. I emailed her the intro. She made the intro for me when I was driving the girls to school. Then by the time I finished dropping the girls off, she sends me the audio file over my messenger. I can hear it, can edit it, and then she can load it into the script for me. So this is advanced text to speech software. You can customize the voice type, the pitch and the speed. I'm going to show you a couple of samples later. You can also add background music as we've done in the intro, and you'll hear in the outro of our show. And actually there are two groups of voices that you can use, the WaveNet one or the Amazon one. So you may or may not know, but Amazon has got quite a sophisticated voice recognition software, as indeed does Google. Of course, that's what you're getting with Alexa is the voice recognition software. This is also working with lots and lots of languages, from Western ones, German, French, Italian, but also through to, for example, Arabic, which I did try, although it didn't read the whole sentence for me quite as I'd expected. But it will translate automatically content that you write in English or French into the other language. There's currently a 1000 word limit, but a thousand words is basically one page of a form, so that should be enough for pretty much anybody. Besides which, what I've done is I've taken 1,000, made the audio, made another thousand, and so on. So you can stitch these together using a platform like Talkia saves a lot of time and money. One, you don't have to go out looking for someone who wants to record or is willing to record 20 seconds or 30 seconds for you could be kind of fun, for example, for a voice message on hold, but also you can have a great deal of control there and then on the kind of voice that you want. So really, you've got your own little recording studio on your desktop. Now, everyone knows that text is great, but audio is better than text. And video, of course, is even better than audio. So what you can do is you can, for example, have a PowerPoint record Talkia and have your talk here narrate your PowerPoint, for example, if you didn't want to be recording that yourself for whatever reason. Or, for example, if you're going to a multilingual event, you could speak it in English, but have Talkia convert that, translate that into local language, for example, Hindi or Belarus, for example, I'm going to show you and have that play out for other people in the audience who are not English speakers or native to your language. So you can explain content so much more effectively and efficiently using audio. The other thing is that, of course, a video makes it look as though you've got a budget. You look like a bigger, richer, more professional company if you've got audio in the same way as if you've got video. So having audio and video, for example, on your PowerPoint or on your emails or on your website, or as part of, for example, if you're going to a trade show and you want to have a looping presentation in multiple languages, this can do that for you without having to hire a freelance translator who's multilingual. And we all know how hard that is. I've just done voiceovers for a client into Bahasa Indonesia, Thai and Vietnamese in Asia for an automotive client. It's taken us a lot of time and money to find those people who can be convincing and do the voiceovers. So voiceovers are expensive. For about a two minute video, you can pay about 200 to $250, depending. If you just want a regular intro for about a minute, it costs you 80 to 90 pounds. I'm not taking anything away from the great voiceover artists that are out there. The talent that's out there that makes, for example, a TV commercial come alive or a cartoon become animated. It's not going to replace that high end, but it is going to give for those of us who don't have the budget or the time for those individual artists to work with us. It's going to give us an alternative. The other thing really about this is speed. I want to get this podcast out today. I can use Talkier in real time. It makes it for me. Whereas if I've got to send something, a script, as I did before, I get it back, they send three versions. I don't like it, I have to give a reply about why I don't like it and so on with this, I can do it. Now, many of us, and not that happy with the sound of our own voice, or we may have a cold, or we just sound a bit dull. We might also just want something to mix it up. Like I've got the Talk here to introduce me, which is kind of cool, because if I introduce myself, it sounds a little bit strange. If you have a product that, for example, would be better read by a woman and you're a guy, you can have a woman or vice versa. And so you can really have lots and lots of reasons why you'd want to have another voice. Another one, for example, is maybe you're young and you're selling something to older people and you like, sound a bit more mature. You know, there are lots and lots of different reasons, but what really matters is that Talkier helps you to get there. Now, I'm lucky, I've got a microphone and a setup. But one person I asked to try and record this intro for me couldn't get a quiet enough room. And there was echo and background noise. Talkia removes that. So now all we do is log into Talkia and it's a very simple interface. You cut and paste or type in what you want to speak and automatically then you can choose different voices and you can adjust the pitch and the tone so you can make it sound more slow if you want to, merely make it easier. Or you can make it go up and down very much like this. And I'LL show you what I mean in just a minute. And you can choose the kind of voices that you choose, male or female, young or old, and also with different regional accents. So you can have English, but American or French or German spoken English, but also you can have those local languages in local language. So enough of me speaking. Let me just show you a couple of examples.

My name is Brian and I am an AI avatar myself generated by the Talkia platform. I've been speaking on behalf of Jim. So until we meet again, Jim and I wish you good health, a profitable business, and that you relax and create only the content which you need as defined by the Active Communications Index. Keep communicating.

Okay, so that was Brian. A little bit dull, but you can hear fairly sonorous voice. Just taking my text. Now let's hear another one.

My name is Brianna and I am an I avatar myself generated by the Taquia platform. I've been speaking on behalf of Jim. So dost until we meet again, Jim and I wish you good health, a profitable business, and that you relax and create only the content which you need as defined by the Active Communications Index.

Okay, now we're going to have a bit of fun and try something a little bit different where I've translated this into a local language.

Manetzhavuk brainer I asem avatar e svorani platformarchtokia akatsao et ima jima takim seinem.

So the final one, if you were trying to guess, is Belarussian. And all I did was typed English into the Tokyo, press the arrow to make it go across and choose the language to translate it to, and it shows Belarussian. So you can see here that I am able to create English language, but with an English and also a local accent. And I'm also able to take the same content, translate it and make it into local language. And that took me five minutes. It's very, very powerful. And you know, Forbes calls it almost indistinguishable from a human's voice. TechCrunch calls it eerily convincing speech, and the Verge says it's some of the most realistic human voices yet. It's not perfect yet, but I think that's as much to do with me because what you can do is you can adjust the spacing, for example, in between the words. You can adjust the pitch and the tone. You can choose between the Google and the Amazon. And there are a large number of different voices that you can choose from in there. And I have found that they don't all work with sort of Equal transparency if you like. So the one Brian sounds very good if you speed him up a little bit. The Belarus one, I didn't have to edit at all, but it sounded very convincing. But you know, it's not a natural language, obviously, but it's very, very close. And it's close enough I think for 90% of applications. So you can add in pauses, you can change the accent, you can increase the grade of the accents and you can also add, add in your background music if you like. And you can also then increase or reduce the volume of the voice because actually you're given a track and you can drop in clips into the track and then below that you can add in your music. In fact, you can add multiple tracks at once. So if you wanted to, you could even create a conversation of people speaking all using Talkia. So you could have an English person and a German and a Chinese all speaking together using Talkia. So it's a very, very powerful tool. And if you're using some of the animated PowerPoint tools like ToOnly, for example, then you can make the voice and drop that into the Toonly video. That's something I've worked on with quite some success as well. So you can create an explainer PowerPoint in a platform called Toonly, actually from the same group that creates Talkio. And then you can embed your audio just by downloading and uploading the MP3. So you can see this is really a fantastic platform. I've been a member now for a couple of years and they continue to give software updates, which is fantastic. Now they do have here they talk about compatibility. For example, you can use it with Photoshop, with Photoshop Brush, you can use it with Toonly, as I've mentioned, also Doodly, which is another one I like, where you can write and make chalkboards and you can upload the audio to. That also works with Camtasia and Filmora. How much does it cost? Well, it's going to be a fraction of the cost of working with a full time sort of voiceover artist. You can have, for example, a standard $39 a month, which gives you 1,000 words per voiceover. That's what I have. 102 voices, 43 male voices, 59 female voices for youth and 30 background music. But also I've just used my own music, I've uploaded that now you can join a standard and that price there is the monthly. But if you join on an annual, you save nearly 50%. It's just $20. So you can imagine for $240 pound 160 you've got pretty much unlimited access to voiceovers. If you want to have Enterprise version it's $40 per month on the annual but then you've got a 5,000 words per voiceover. I mean that is really a long form essay. Most articles are only a thousand words and as I say I've daisy chained my articles together to make two articles 1500 words and I just cut and paste the two mp3 files using platform like descript that I'm using here. If you go for the enterprise you get 404 voices. 166 male voices, which sounds more like a Welsh Valley choir 238 female voices which would be Harlem Angels 23 voices of children or youth 150 background music and commercial rights as well. So the commercial rights to I guess what you create with that music, whereas with the standard you're I think you're not supposed to rebroadcast it as such. In other words use it on tv. So I personally found talkier excellent as a platform and it comes from the voomly group. So they also have toonly and doodly which is great. So I wanted to share with you just how the tools are available for us now to create great content. And sometimes there are bottlenecks, sometimes someone's not available for doing what we'd like to do. But tools like this one, talkia are there for you and me to use. Available today online. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Unnoticed Entrepreneur show. Goodbye Bahina Knee Adayou Totsians alfredasean Bless.

Zara Masha Odabo, Luke Xen Zaijian.