AI taking Jobs? Miles Chicoine on Artificial Intelligence + Media & Film Market

Interview about AI & Synthetic Voice Over

5 trends or hypes that shall pass

Intro

It was a lovely Monday, November, morning in Brazil and afternoon in Glasgow, UK, when I interviewed Miles Chicoine, CEO and co-founder of Voquent, a UK-based company and one of the major players in the voiceover and audio industry.

And after this interview, I got even more fascinated by the company's culture and also Miles’ clarity on subjects like AI, market for 2024 and voice art.

I'm Amanda, voice artist and sound engineer from Brazil, and I invite you to check it out this conversation.

Conversation

12 Tones of Voice

Amanda de Andrade:

The first question I want to ask you is not related to AI, is not related to the market, but it is related to our craft that is: naming emotions or categorizing what seems to be impossible to categorize: style or tone of voice, and when I first visited Voquent’s website, I found this approach in the company it is very different from the other companies I know and because I am a very organized person, I like to organize things, organize knowledge and put boundaries and master everything I see in front of me, I thought: that's very interesting because that's something I was trying to do myself alone.

And I see the company doing this and I wonder, where did you get inspiration to organize it into 12 tones of voice? Did you do some research? Or maybe it was a product of a team’s inspiration and effort to map voice and performance in this way? I would like to know more about the backstage of this framework.

Miles Chicoine:

We did about a year of research before we even started Voquent to identify what we thought would be the most relevant indexing that actually works for categorizing and cataloging audio of voice over and we actually came up with the framework for it, which we in our earliest days, we called it the "extended attribute audio sample indexing system", which is a really big mouthful. But what it did is it basically was a database system. It was built on creating index variables and categories in such a way as that they would have consequent relationships.

And so there were certain things that you could pick that wouldn't allow for other selections. And then there was other things that you could pick that would allow. And so there was rules. It wasn't just a matter of just saying, "here's a whole bunch of different tables, and those are just basic tags". It really doesn't work that way.

And I think that any of our competitors, which is anybody who's tried to offer search, they know that because they try to build something similar or try to use similar ideas, they've really struggled. And that's because there is a big database engine underneath that they can't just create a bunch of tags and hope that it'll work.

It doesn't work that way. It never can. When it came to like things like the tones, that was something that we did to develop a version of that early on that we felt was about right. It was pretty accurate. But there was developments that we made after we had launched in sort of summer of 2018 where we realized this can be improved, that we can do more and and really it was a bit of trial and error after launch in terms of perfecting that.

But we did a lot of research of other people's studies and research on, you know, what are the qualities of emotion, what what are the qualities of vocal texture, what are the qualities that are identifiable when you hear a voice and those studies definitely formed a big part of our research.

But most of it we came up with by learning from building our own system, consulting with each other, then consulting with audio engineers and asking them and kind of getting to the point where we thought, you know what, I think for the most part, most people are going to be able to fall into one of these categories correctly and it won't be inaccurate.

And the rest was was kind of history after that. And so yeah, it took a lot of time and effort but I'm really happy where we got to and it's extremely difficult to try to replicate that. I mean if somebody said you want to go start Voquent again and build that from the start, I'd be like "No thanks".

It's it was an extraordinary amount of work. But, you know, we got it to where it is now, and I'm really, really happy with it. And I think clients are happy with it. And I think that voice actors who are putting up their audio and understand that this is relevant to getting work also understand or at least appreciate it. So I feel like it's been a win-win for the most part.

Voiceover Samples X Demo Reels

Amanda de Andrade:

That is amazing because Voquent is talking to many different kinds of clients. It can be an audio engineer, it can be another artist, it can be a seasoned media producer. So each professional has a different way of thinking. An artist may think in a role, first. A media producer might have the idea the voice he needs. Voquent actually found a path.

So we are going to follow this path. And people started gravitating around it. So voice actors started learning about the system, started uploading their samples and fitting this framework. At the beginning I thought, "Well, that can be very overwhelming. But time has passed and I've booked many projects with Voquent. I work consistently with the project managers. Well, it works.

You have to get the sample from the demo where you have so many samples happening one after another, but it pays off.

Miles Chicoine:

When we started out, we we didn't accept demo reels at all. And a lot of people were trying to send us their reels and were annoyed that we wouldn't just accept the reels and, you know, because that's the way they've been doing things. And we knew that we were bucking trends and we were kind of trailblazing a different way of doing things.

And so there might have been a few different sites kind of on the fringes that were suggesting that they recorded samples in some way or whatever. But for the most part, the industry, from the voiceover perspective, voiceover actors, I think initially they didn't really like having to upload audio samples. They wanted to upload reels. You know, "This is my commercial reel, this is my educational reel, this is my comedy reel, goodbye. This is my audio book reel. Goodbye."

You know, they don't care. Just "Here's my reel, give me work". But I think the problem is, when clients are looking for a voice actor, they don't want to listen to a reel, they just want to listen to a clip of audio that matches as closely as possible what they're looking to achieve.

And we knew that if we can index the individual audio samples, it means that whether a client searches on our website or whether we do our own searches and provide options, we can get a lot closer to giving examples of what a client might be looking for instead of sending a reel and asking them to go to, you know, 1 minute 12 on the reel or, you know, "There's a really, really good track it, you know, 35 seconds that really matches what you're looking for", and clients don't want that.

They don't care about the rest of the real they care about their project. And so if it's not relevant to their project, it's irrelevant to them and and you're losing them.

When we started providing audio samples, we found that clients really, really, really liked it. And it's amazing because obviously at the start everybody was saying, you know, "You don't need samples, you need reels, you idiots".

But here we are in 2023 and everybody talks about audio samples now. And you know, I can't take credit for everything and every piece of change that happens in a particular part of an industry. But that's definitely something that we've led and we've changed in the VO industry worldwide is an acceptance that samples are actually better than reels because samples are relevant to what the client wants.

And I think most people now realize they need a big catalog of samples that they can send to clients as and when, and then if they send their reel it looks like they're throwing enough mud in hoping that something sticks and therefore it's more dangerous to send a reel because you're asking the client to waste their time listening to parts of you that they don't care about.

Amanda de Andrade:

Do the work for me. I'm too busy right now. You can see if you find a sample that suits you inside my demo reel.

So I think it seems Voquent has helped to mature not only voice actors, but the industry itself.

Miles Chicoine:

I think so, yeah. To get inside the client's mind, that's very important.

AI Training & Projects

Amanda de Andrade:

It's impossible not to mention AI. And we are going to enter deeper waters right now. I've already watched some interviews you've made in the past, and I think you have talked a lot about it.

So I only want to know if it was an easy decision for Voquent when the company created that clause that gives peace of mind for the voice actors regarding their samples in the website. How Voquent is going to use them, etc. And then we received an email. It was this year. I didn't see any company took so massive action.

I mean massive not only in the repetition of the message but in the stance. So I wonder, was it an easy decision because we see other companies taking light actions so they seem cool for the voice actors, and there are some companies taking massive action on the contrary. And I wonder if it was an easy decision because this decision is pro art, it is not pro business strictly.

A company may be tempted to take business actions, and I see that it was a manifesto in favor of art. Was it an easy decision? Maybe it was, maybe not.

Miles Chicoine:

And so the first thing is that we put in a clause that it goes in our terms and conditions for voice actors who are signing up that assures them that we are not using their audio to train A.I. models and that if they were to involve themselves in any A.I. work of any kind, it would have to be obviously with their consent as part of that specific project based on specific terms.

And we did that about a year and a half ago, well before Chat GPT had come out or, you know, everybody was raving about how amazing A.I. is, it's going to change our lives and blah, blah, blah. And we did that because we felt that we could see there is an undercurrent of concern throughout the industry, and we wanted voice actors to not have to assume or presume that we weren't misusing it.

We wanted to be open in stating that we definitely weren't misusing their audio for something that they actually weren't agreeing to. And so I think we had a bit of foresight in that respect, and really we did that. That was an easy decision because it didn't have any impact on the fact that if we were going to do an AI project for, say, a good cause, like, you know, helping, you know, disabled people who can't speak, speak or something, I think that the at that time we didn't feel like it was going to be something that anybody really cared about that much, maybe a few.

But it also wasn't really going to ultimately impact the ability for us to work on projects, if that's what you know, if it called for it on an A.I. project, it just means that we're not going to use their their audio to build an audio engine and try to sell that. And I think that putting in the terms and conditions to say that this is how it works was an easy decision.

But I think if we fast forward later on, I think it was a tougher decision, you know, this year to declare a firmer stance against AI because of course in doing so by stating that we weren't comfortable working on a project for the foreseeable future until regulation is introduced. There's no doubt about it that we're missing out on business opportunities that we would have otherwise got.

There is there is a market demand for AI. I would say that the market demand for people building AI voiceovers is greater than the demand for people who want to buy an actual A.I. voice. I don't actually think people want to buy AI voices for their work. I think they use them because they're super cheap and they don't feel that they can afford a proper voice or they're willing to make compromises to the creative integrity of their work by putting something cheaper and in just getting by with that.

I think that's the majority of the customers that have that attitude. But I think that the sheer volume of people that want to build AI voice overs with, you know, AI voice over models like Google, like Amazon, like Apple, like Microsoft, like Facebook, and a huge number of of VC funded other companies all want to, you know, be seen as being relevant in that industry.

So, yeah, we're definitely losing business that we could have gained if we decided to work on A.I. projects. But I think that in terms of a moral perspective, again, the decision was an easy one. And the reason is that when you look at compensation for A.I. work, that's something that's very, very difficult to kind of unravel, not for us specifically, but across the world.

I mean, if you look at the biggest actors union in the world, SAG-AFTRA in America, they have no idea on how to create a compensation, a measured form of compensation for AI work. All they could do is introduce a very small clause and and that's it, that says you won't be copied identically.

Crimes using AI

There will be little variations, but really, there isn't really any protection from AI for artists. But where regulation needs to step in is where control and consent are regarded. Because if people are going to misuse what is essentially a clone, a cloned identity, at least in the form of an audio or maybe an audio and video to commit a crime, like commit a crime against a child or clone the voice of a child to commit a crime against a parent or vice versa.

Well, that's that's criminal. And the problem is that that's happening right now. And there's no regulation. We felt that we needed to take a stand and make our position clear because we don't want to encourage the use of a technology that can continue to be normalized without identifying the practices that are taking place, that are extraordinarily destructive to people's lives on a criminal basis.

But make no mistake, even if they introduced regulation in, say, the states, which I know they're trying to do it, I think that's coming soon. And maybe if that regulation was also introduced in the United Kingdom and around the world in the EU, I don't think it's going to ultimately resolve the compensation issue, which is going to continue to be a problem worldwide.

And we'll just have to wait and see how things go. But right now we'll see. It can be used for criminal misuse. We're going to have nothing to do with it. If regulation steps into to fix that, then maybe what we can do is introduce rules by which we would feel comfortable working with on the basis that compensation is fair.

But at this moment in time, we don't see people being fair in compensation either. We see jobs being posted on other sites and with other agencies and other production companies saying $150 to clone your voice and we can use it for whatever we want and people are doing it. And I think that's absolutely insane.

Fear of Artificial Intelligence

Amanda de Andrade:

Yes, I think people are too afraid. It's very interesting what you said that AI made possible to people that weren't clients from voice actors. So there's not so much that competition. We see a lot of people using it, but people that weren't going to hire a professional voice actor anyway, so the fear and the effects we see, they are real, people are saying that they have less work, etc., but they're not addressing the right factors. The contraction, where money is going right now, where money went in the pandemic, etc..

Miles Chicoine:

Yeah, I would say for any, any voice actor that is thinking that A.I. is taking all their work. I would suggest that they they listen to the radio, listen to TV, listen to streaming advertisements, listen to commercials, listen to audiobook narrations.

Do they hear AI? Most of the time they don't. AI and certainly the smaller companies that are hedging their bets, you know, their basic placing, their bet, sorry, on, you know, carving out a position they can somehow compete with the really biggest tech companies. Those organizations are trying so hard to make everyone believe that their A.I. voices are just as good for all these mediums.

But they're not, they're not getting used. They're going to continue to not getting used. They're not good enough, and they've got a long way to go before they're good enough. However, there is a form of normalization that's taking place in less relevant, less commercial, less visible audiences, smaller audiences like your IVR, telephone system, like your, you know, like some sort of basic, you know, quick, cheap explainer video somewhere where A.I. is being used because people just don't want to pay for it because they don't value how they're going to make the listener or audience of their material feel they don't care is like, Here's your explainer video, and if you don't like it, I don't care. I'm going to give you the audio because I've been told to. Here's an audio, I don't care.

And so it's the apathy of those producers that might be working on an amateur level or even on a professional level, but it's the apathy that's driving them to use AI voice and the lack of a major audience that's relevant because if there was, they would absolutely be paying for a human voice over because they would be terrified of destroying the audience's confidence in their material.

Because as soon as they hear an AI, they're going to switch off and it only takes about ten or 15 seconds. I know it's getting better, but ten or 15 seconds later, if they realize that you're actually just in, you lose absolute brand confidence people. They think completely different about you and therefore it's an extremely stupid thing to do to a major production, to use an AI voiceover and there will be a few people who do it.

But what I'm trying to say is, is that for the majority of voiceover work, it looks scarier than it actually is. The work that is available is still there. If you're not seeing it just means it is not unfortunately, coming to you specifically, but it's not being stolen by AI. We're not going to see A.I. in league game roles.

The Bubble & Hype of AI

Miles Chicoine:

We're not going to see A.I. doing the trailers for featured films. We're not going to see the AIs for TV commercials or streaming commercials. We're still going to hear human voices in those mediums for quite a long time. And therefore, anyone who's thinking A.I. is taking all the work in, they're responsible for the lack of work right now, which there is, well, it's not AI, and it's really, really important to not become depressed and think that there won't be changes in the market that will improve, it is not because of A.I.. A.I. has a part to play in how things are working right now, but it isn't affecting the voiceover industry in the way that people are fearing or assuming that it is.

There are other factors that are affecting the voiceover industry that people just haven't really been able to piece together. But AI played a much smaller part than they think. It's just that because A.I. is so visible in the news right now.

Amanda de Andrade:

They're putting money, they're putting a lot of money into marketing.

Miles Chicoine:

They are, but that money gets burnt because eventually it's exactly what happened during the "dot com" bubble, right?

I'm not saying the AI is going to go away. It's not. But there's going to be a lot of people who've invested in smaller companies that do AI that have made like ten, 20 or $50 million investments. I know that's not small to anybody, but from an investor perspective, that's a very small investment. And if somebody is, you know, invest in a series, a investment or ten or 20 million in a company that's pioneering, the large majority of those companies are going to get they're going to get their lunch by Google and Microsoft and Apple.

They're going to get destroyed. They have no chance. And they think that they're on to a big thing because everybody's talking about AI right now, but they're going to get absolutely destroyed by the big tech companies that have all the power to decide which technology to use and who to sell it to. And so all the people who want to create wrappers for GPT and want to create a voiceovers that aren't purchased via Amazon or maybe even they are and they get resold or are purchased by Google and then resold these guys is they're not going to make any profitability.

They're going to lose all that investment money. And yes, they're spending all that investment money on marketing to create a market position. But if you look at the accounts of the majority of those companies, they have really high burn rates. In other words, they're you know, you might have 20 million at best and you're losing 10 million a year.

How long can you do that before before the investor goes, right, I'm losing all my money. How am I going to get my money back? And they go, I don't know, because we haven't been able to do this or that, Google this. And they're making all these excuses. And then the investor goes "Right, okay, you're done. We're closing down the company."

And that's going to happen in masse over the next year or two. There's going to be a lot of companies that go bust and a few will still exist. It'll just be controlled by the largest companies, of which there are only a few, and not by the many, many smaller companies that are all trying to make noise right now and create, you know, be one of the few that creates a market leading position.

And so there is going to be a mass culling a little bit like, you know, just wiping out a large amount of livestock all the same time when it comes to smaller AI companies that are all trying to be relevant right now, There's a lot of them that are going to go bust and it's going to leave a few that are okay.

But the ones who are going to be really okay are the big, big companies. And I'm not just talking about voice over for this. I mean, all things AI, there's no way of getting away from, all applications you use are now using A.I. and when you accept their terms and conditions to be able to use that application, you're basically using an application that is already leveraging A.I. of some sort, whether it's for your graphics or for your writing or your spelling or for, you know, for your your audio editing.

It's all A.I. AI is here to stay. It ain't going away. There's no getting away from it. Everybody is already unwittingly using A.I. without even knowing it, just by interacting with products like Facebook. Just by going on to Facebook, you're supporting A.I.. Just by going on to YouTube, you're supporting A.I.. Anything that you do that uses technology is supporting a company that is investing in A.I. with or without your consent.

And it will be used and it will be implemented and everybody will be an unwitting agent for the development of A.I., whether they like it or not. Yeah.

And so that's something that has to be accepted. And when we say that we want regulation, we're not fighting against the inevitable, which is the A.I. is going to play a bigger part of everyone's lives than anyone can even imagine right now.

What AI will never do

But I think it's also really, really important not to make excuse this as it's commonly done. People confuse A.I. with sentience that might come in the future. I just don't think people have any concept whatsoever for the most part of what sentience actually means. The human brain, you know, sentience for a human human brain takes into account about 33 different factors.

Most people think that that's the five basic senses. Like I can hear, I can smell, I can see, I can taste, I can touch it. But actually there is so many more senses that the human brain adopts to do with what you do with your temperature, controlling your sense of fear, like your fear for your life. If something is going to happen, you know, like when the hairs on your on your arm stand on end.

And there's all kinds of interesting scientific descriptions that have been used to describe what are actually as many as three senses, which all need to be computed simultaneously in order for the human brain to create a comprehension or an idea at any one time. And so in that respect, the human brain is using something equivalent to many, many, many quantum computers to essentially be sentient, to try to program in all those factors that we have in our own biology, to try to replicate biological sentience with an artificial product that can pretend to be centered through a text chat is probably one of the most stupid things I've heard in a long, long time.

But because people don't really have any comprehension and necessarily of how things do work and they've watched movies like Terminator, a lot of people just think that at some point A.I. is going to take over and some people will joke about it and some people don't get the joke and then believe it. They don't realize that satire, they're being cynical or, you know, and some people just genuinely believe that because they don't understand technology.

But there's no way of getting away from the fact that A.I. looks smarter and smarter and smarter. But actually, no matter how smart it looks compared to a human brain and a human comprehension, it's incredibly stupid. It's terrible. It has hallucinations, it makes wrong decisions, it gets wrong facts, it gets wrong data, it builds data on wrong data.

It's a terrible, terrible, broken system. But because people can see the potential of how it can help organize and modify and tweak and they see how it can be used in toolkits, it's going to continue to be developed. But this whole concept of it being sentient, it is absolutely ridiculous. But because so many people love to fantasize about the idea of it, it keeps A.I. sounding like it's more relevant than it actually is.

Amanda de Andrade:

Yes. And I want to finish this topic saying that I've just realized that people that fear it, they're not committed to their self knowledge and their self development, at a point that they lose sight of how complex and how amazing humans are. Yeah, people stop thinking about themselves, their potential. They stay in this level of thought. So I think that the antidote for this fear is to look to yourself with respect for what you are and how much you can be.

Because it is the creation of the human mind. So people forget they are the masters of this technology. I think there's nothing to fear.

Miles Chicoine:

Yeah. No, I mean, I would agree. I don't think people should fear. I mean, nobody wants to live in a state of fear and certainly not perpetually, not forever. You know, I think that you have to be conscious that if you support the development of an A.I. model of her voice, you're you're probably committing commercial suicide for year with your future in voice work.

But on the other hand, if you're if you're terrified of everything that's related to A.I. and how it's going to, you know, kind of become more and more synonymous with how we operate and what we do, then you need to come to terms with that and move on because it is here to stay and it is going to play a big part of our lives.

Aspects of it will be for the betterment of humanity and society and cultures and countries and economies, and some of it will be disastrous, absolutely disastrous. There's no way of denying that. But yes, I think that you have to move forward without living in fear. You have to accept the things that you cannot change and work on the things that you can and the things that you can change.

Are you being more human than ever, which is very, very difficult to replicate if you can if you can build, you know, audio that sounds like it comes from your soul because it draws on the wisdom and the experience of your unique life and not just some standardized "This is how everybody else sounds. So I'll try to sound like that too."

If you can draw on the things that make you unique, it's very difficult for an A.I. to replicate with that. It's very difficult for an AI to compete with that. And I would say the same thing to an artist. You know, it's like, yes, there is good AI, but if you can work on the things that make your art unique all the air can do is try to copy and rip off your work because they're not intelligent.

They're just just big company stealing your work and then reproducing it without your consent. But as if to stop you from pushing forward and creating unique works that only you can use. And if you focus on your uniqueness, you know that's better than doing nothing. And it certainly has more value than trying to be the same as everyone else.

And so that stood well before AI, it was, " does it look like a relevant problem?" and it was more like, "yeah, that could become an issue maybe in ten years or something". Maybe it came a lot quicker. But, but even before I was even considered relevant or a problem for anyone, you know, people still were working in it in a very difficult saturated market in voiceover And how do I differentiate myself against other people? Not AI's, but just other people? And how do I get work with other people? Can, but I can't seem to. And the answer? It was exactly the same. It was focusing on the things that make you unique

Amanda de Andrade:

Yeah. It's a daily decision. I want to expand my boundaries. I want to learn more about myself.

I want to create something that nobody thought about it before.

Film & Media Market for 2024

Amanda de Andrade:

Yes, now I have a question about market because we are talking about AI, and I see that people are blaming AI while we have other aspects in the market, we have more competition because at least in Brazil we saw many people coming to the voiceover industry. There were more people and they bought some courses, some coaches, and now they massively entered the industry.

So that's an issue that may be leading to more competition, less work, etc.. So you are blaming AI for everything. But we still see the effects in the market in some areas like education. And I want you to know your perspective for 2024. If you see an increase or decrease or stagnation in any media that uses voice over human voiceover do you see something rising, something declining?

Miles Chicoine:

I see literally everything declining right now.

Everything is declining. There is no special area that is safe right now in terms of work and because A.I. doesn't do commercials and it doesn't do theaters, and even though people would like to do audio books, nobody wants to listen to a full audio book with an A.I..

It just feel like, you know, nails on a chalkboard. It's horrible. You know, once you realize you're listening to an AI, it just takes the soul out. You don't want to listen to each other, read it, or have a human voice read it to you. And so there isn't really a big market for A.I. in audio books as much as the big companies like Amazon and Apple would like there to be so that they could make money out of that, there's not an appetite for it.

People don't want to listen to AI's read books. They want to hear people read books, or they just want to read them. And and so I think that if we knew that all the issues related to the industry were relevant to A.I., you would still see a relevant amount of work in the mediums. The A.I. doesn't operate well, but actually in actual fact, I think it goes without saying that the industry worldwide is seeing a downturn the likes of which nobody has seen in decades.

You've seen platforms removing, you know, you know, their owners and CEOs because of investors. You've seen companies going austere. There's people who maybe made a really good income from voiceover that are having to go out and get other jobs and find other forms of income. There's people who are leaving the industry entirely. And this isn't just the voiceover industry.

This is the film and media sector in general in America and UK has been absolutely decimated and that has a trickle down effect in other economies. You know, like for instance, you know, it's estimated that about last year that video advertising in Brazil was at about 2.2 billion for the year. And that's a big advertising spend nationwide. It's about double what India spends, but not as many people.

Obviously, in Brazil is a great market because obviously, you know, Brazilian Portuguese is spoken as a first language by the vast majority of the population. And it's got a very young, affluent and tech savvy market of people who like to use their phones to consume data and consume content, use apps. So it actually represents a tremendous market opportunity.

And therefore, there's going to be an uptick in work for that, but not proportionately to the number of people who want to find work. And the fact of the matter is, is that 2.2 billion of video advertising in Brazil and compared to about I think 78 billion in the United States alone or 9 billion in the United Kingdom with a much smaller population, all things are not born equal in terms of how video content is spent.

And so when you look at major economies like South Korea, Japan, Germany, United Kingdom and America, which which are representing the vast largest proportion of video spend probably 85 to probably more than like 94% of the entire world's video spend is in those countries. If they're not getting as much work like they had over the last year, then you can serious guarantee that that's going to have a trickle down effect everywhere else.

And so I guess what I'm trying to say is, is that the industry in the film and media sector has been absolutely distraught for the last six months. And even before that, there has been, you know, sort of a noticeable downturn. And I think that the world can recognize and see that that's happening everywhere and there are no safe places.

Everything is down, all work is down. And this is a very tough situation for people who work in any relation to film and media and voice, because it means that there's just not enough work to go around and there's no clear indication as to what to focus on that gives you a better chance.

You just need to hang in there until the market gets better.

There's no silver bullet or area that you can kind of hide in until things improve elsewhere.

Amanda de Andrade:

But do you think that the world is getting quieter when we we say that the budgets for multimedia projects are not being spent like they were in the past? Regarding voice over. The world is getting quieter? Less voices are being hired? Can we say that?

Miles Chicoine:

I think you could say that to a degree, but I don't think that's a long term thing. I think what we are seeing right now is the fact that interest rates and inflation in the major economies has become such a problem that everyone's on the verge of a recession. You look at the stock market and it's really struggled.

They've only just started to show some improvement in the S&P 500 over the last week or two. So you've had you've had a situation where over the last five or six months, you know, the entire worldwide market in economy has not been good. There hasn't been anything positive going on. You've had the war with Russia and Ukraine. You know, if Russia invades Ukraine, how long does it take before Russia backs off or there's some sort of peace agreement?

And now you've got, obviously, the whole problem with Hamas attacking Israel and then Israel attacking, you know, Gaza to try to, you know, you know, basically do what they have to do there. And that obviously creates another major, you know, violent conflict on the world stage. And this focuses people in their minds and where money used to go and where they need to be worried, where they need to be concerned.

And these things affect the markets. You know, the fact that people can't buy cheap Russian gas affected the market, the fact that poorer third world nations can't get hold of grain, that Ukraine can't ship out is affecting the market. The fact that, you know, OPEC will bottleneck oil to keep the price extraordinarily high so that those countries can benefit more at the cost of other economies.

That's what they're doing to support their economy. And Russia is obviously in OPEC's. And so however you look at it, there's been a lot of economic struggle. And and we're only starting to see potentially a little bit of settlement now. And I think things will start to improve around mid 2024 to late 2024. I think people will start to see, you know, more voices being heard, more production is happening and you'll feel like there's more hope.

Until then, everyone needs to prepare for a long, dark winter.

It could it could take a very, very long time before it starts to show a little bit of sunshine, a little bit of hope. Again, that's just the way things are right now. Unfortunately.

Successful Voice Actor in 2024

Amanda de Andrade:

I promised I would bring a question from a colleague and he started doing voiceover in the midst of the pandemic. So he's in the market and he follows your movements on the Internet. And he watched an interview from you. And he asked me to ask you, how do you describe the profile of a successful voice actor in 2024?

What does this voice actor do? How do this in terms of branding of education, how they approach companies? So I'm bringing his question, if you could ask, he would be very happy.

Miles Chicoine:

Yeah, okay, I'll try my best to answer that. It's a it's a very broad question and invites broad answers. But I'll try to keep some of this on point.

A successful voice actor. It could be seen in the eyes of one person as being very successful and maybe not so successful in the eyes of another. And so success is relative. And let's keep that in mind when we talk about what success actually means. Is success making, you know, $25,000 or equivalent a year or $35,000 equivalent a year, or is it $50,000 a year, or is a $100,000 a year?

Success can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But I don't want to be generalized. Let's look at let's look at the average things that a person should have in order to either be successful or have an opportunity to become successful in one shape or another.

Website for Voice Actors

Miles Chicoine:

You need to have a voice actor website. The website isn't there to generate all your opportunities.

If it does, that's fantastic, but they'll find it very, very hard to generate web leads when there's lots and lots of sites, not just sites like ours, but other sites that will ultimately get looked at before an individual gets looked at. If a person says, I want somebody to type in voice actor or voiceover and find my website on the first page, I'm sorry, but your chances of getting that are very, very low because you're competing against, first of all, maybe 100,000 other people who have the same idea, who are also voice actors and have had websites out a lot longer than you and maybe have really good content.

You're also competing against sites which have aggregate volumes of voice actors like we do, but we have over 30,000 voice actors. And so you're not just competing against 100,000 independent voice actors, you're also competing against 30,000 voice actors on one site. And how many sites are there like ours that maybe have a large catalog of voice actors? Certainly, you know, probably at least 30 or 40 of some kind that have big libraries.

And so how are you going to even get on the third or the fourth page for a generic term like voiceover or a voice actor? You need to set your your expectations more realistically and think about the specific accent that you could do that you might be able to rank for on Google. But keep in mind that having a website should not be your first port of call for it.

The existence of your website should not be something that you see as a source of leads. If it is, that's great. But what you should initially do is have a website that is basically your online business card. It's how people are going to be able to reach out to you after they've heard some of your demos because they received your email or after they've looked at your website because you met them in person or after they look at your website because they found out about you, because they looked on some form somewhere or they saw something that you posted on a comment on social media.

In other words, all the things that a person has to do to market themselves does not change whether they have a website or not. But the website is what allows you to give to clients the idea that you're professionally invested in what you're doing and you have a business card and it's online. It's not a paper card, it's an online website.

And so I would look at your website as a business card before you look at it is a lead gen tech tool. And I would ensure that if your business card is clean, crisp, professional, to the point, it has your audio demos and your contact details on that first page no matter what. And so first and foremost, try to get a website going.

It doesn't have to be amazing. Just make sure that it does a great job of capitalizing on the people who do find you.

Voicereels and voiceover demos & samples

The second thing is, you know, obviously you've got to get professional voice over demos. If you don't have professional demos, you need to get them commissioned. We obviously have a sister site, Voicereels where people can get professional demos recorded at what I think is a very, very good price for people who are trying to get started.

We're not the only ones who will offer professional demos. There's people who will charge a lot for professional demos, but maybe get a better service because apparently they're better engineers. I highly doubt it. I think our engineers are probably some of the most experienced in the world, but I would argue that that your demo is only going to be as good as your performance.

Amanda de Andrade:

Does Voicereels offer in other languages?

Miles Chicoine:

We've finished it in Japanese, Korean, French, English voice over demos. There's there's lots of languages. So we can we can work with any language and we actually have a director for any language that we don't ourselves speak in. So, you know, we we offer a complete service for anyone who buys, and it's not limited to anywhere in the world.

So if somebody wants to get a voicereel, I'm not trying to make a pitch. What I'm trying to say is they can get it from from our sister site, but there's also lots of other places that they can get it. And it's something that they should be focused on because if you don't have a good reel and good samples, it's going to be difficult for people to hear what you are.

It means you're relying purely on auditions. And auditions is not the way that you're going to succeed, because if you do auditions, you're going to find that you have to send out to hundreds of auditions just get a job, that's not going to work for a new person. That's going to just be so destroying. Forget it. It might be good practice, but you don't need that much practice and you need to be able to get opportunities without that.

So yeah, I would argue that demos are extremely important. So website, demos and coaching...

Voice over coach

Miles Chicoine:

...If you can find a coach that you can work with that can give you advice, you don't have to trust everything they say and everything they do and say is the right thing, the only way that the coaches that you get advice from, and the more other voice actors that you interact with, the more other people that you communicate with and try to learn from.

And if you take a path of continuous learning in everything that you do and stay humble, you know, be a student of your art, then you will get better. Then you will get better and better and better. And people will compliment you more and more and more. And if you have a good website and you have those good demos and you're constantly making better demos and you're getting good coaching and you're working and you're getting a bit of work in and you're performing at work and then you get a bit more work.

Well, regardless of how much money you're making, I define that as success. That's what success is, is being inspired by something that compels you to do a little bit better than you did yesterday. That's what success actually is. It's not, you know, I made £1,000,000 and so I'm successful. Well, there's always somebody who made 2 million or I made $10 million and I'm successful.

But there's always somebody who made ten, 20 million. It doesn't matter what you do, There's always somebody more successful than you. So you shouldn't compare yourself to others to define what success is, you should compare yourself to your self and who you are. Yes. Yeah, I'm not philosophical. I'm just saying that those are the things that you need to do and then you just need to keep pushing and innovating and believing in yourself.

And that's whether you're a voice actor or an artist or a musician or a model or a singer or any other form of artist. And it goes beyond art, that goes to literally all walks of life.

Don't Stop Growing

Amanda de Andrade:

So don't stop, don't stop.

Because people may be tempted to, "Oh, I need to change my industry. I'm going to do any other thing. I'll sell my microphone". Yesterday I saw people saying this. There were selling their microphones. I complement your message with my own advice. Don't stop. What doesn't grow, retracts. There's no way of staying the same. If you're not growing, you're going to be left behind.

Don't think you are being neutral. Don't think you're safe or you are static. You are not.

Miles Chicoine:

Yeah. Nothing stands still. I completely agree.

Amanda de Andrade:

You can't stop.

We've come to an end. Thank you so much, Miles, for taking the time, putting the energy in this conversation and accepting my invitation right away.

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