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AI AND VO
The conversation in the voice over community right now is almost entirely about AI. Everywhere I turn, someone is asking whether this technology will replace us, whether our voices still have a place in a world. I don’t consider myself an optimist or a pessimist. I’m just someone who looks at how things are developing and tries to understand where they are headed. Creative fields have always lived with uncertainty, but this moment feels different. While many of us defend our role as voice actors, we also use AI tools in our daily work. We use them to help write scripts, design thumbnails, and organize projects. I myself have even used Suno to craft music for commercials. I’ve leaned on the same technology that we worry might one day make us optional. That tension sits at the center of everything we do right now. DOES HUMAN VOICE MATTER? What gets said most often in the community is that AI does not have a soul. The human voice, we’re told, carries emotion and lived experience. When we read a line, we understand the context behind it. We feel the weight of the words and the moment they’re meant to serve. I believe that. I’ve built my entire career around that idea. Voice acting, at its best, is not just sound. It’s timing, it’s silence, it’s breath, and meaning. It’s knowing when to hold back and when to push forward. It’s understanding a name, a culture, a story, and treating it with respect. But sometimes I stop and ask a harder question. What if, for the audience, it doesn’t matter as much as we think it does? LESSONS FROM THE PAST I’m a Gen Xer, and I grew up with a phone attached to the wall. It had a cord that stretched across the kitchen, and if someone picked up another line, you heard it. That phone had presence in our house. It felt permanent, like a fixture. If you had shown me a smartphone back then, it wouldn’t have felt normal. It would have felt like something that Marty McFly brought back from a science fiction movie. But change didn’t happen all at once. It happened step by step. The rotary phone became a touch-tone phone. Then call waiting came along around the time I was a teen. Then a flip phone in my 20’s. Then a BlackBerry in my late 20’s. Now I carry a device that takes all of my travel photos, plays music on the plane, edits video, and connects me to my friends around the world in seconds. FROM CHARACTER TO COMMODITY The old phone had character. The new one is a tool. It’s replaceable. It’s a commodity. But it’s also completely normal now. That’s the comparison I keep coming back to when I think about AI voices. What feels strange and stiff today could become background noise tomorrow. The audience may not be looking for character. They may just be looking for content that’s fast and easy to consume. I spoke with a videographer recently who told me that many of the projects submitted to him already have voices on them. Not human voices. AI voices. He said it with a kind of disappointment, because he understands how much depth a real voice can add to his visuals. He knows that no matter how good the editing or the imagery is, something is missing when the voice feels fake. But he also knows why it’s happening. It’s cheaper. It’s faster. It’s always available. That reality is hard to ignore. Even people who appreciate the difference still feel the pressure of convenience. LOWERING THE BAR I see it in my own life. My mother watches programs on YouTube where the same rigid AI voice shows up over and over. It mispronounces words. It sounds robotic. It lacks rhythm and warmth. But there is so much content like that out there that she barely notices anymore. Over time, what once sounded wrong starts to sound normal. That’s what worries me. Not that AI voices exist, but that they might become the standard. When something becomes the standard, the bar lowers. Expectations change. The audience stops looking for good and starts looking for good enough. Sometimes I feel like that old phone on the wall. Attached to an idea of how things used to be, holding onto a sense of character in a world that values convenience. BUT HUMAN VOICE STILL MATTERS But I also know this. There are moments when only a human voice will do. Moments that require care, and understanding, and real storytelling. Moments where the proper pronunciation of a name matters. Where a pause matters, a breath matters. I don’t know exactly where this leaves us as voice over talent. It does feel like an uphill battle at times. But maybe the answer isn’t to compete with AI on its terms. Maybe it’s to stand firmly in what it cannot truly replicate, even if fewer people notice right away. EMOTION VS. AUTOMATION Technology will keep moving forward. It always does. The question I keep asking myself isn’t whether the world will change. It’s whether there will always be space, even a small one, for a voice that has emotion instead of automation. That space may not be as loud as it once was. It may not be as crowded. But for now, I believe it’s still there, waiting for the people who can hear the difference. For me, a passionate storyteller, I believe it’s worth fighting for. |
By Dane Reid
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