What Is Textual content To Speech? 6 Advantages For L&D Execs
What is text-to-speech and how do L&D experts benefit from it?
When you think of computer-generated voices, you might think of a couple of familiar topics: Siri robotic telling knock-knock jokes on command, Roomba warning you to be careful before sweeping the cat’s paws, or legacy text -to-Speech, which reads training content so robotically that no employee would want to listen to it.
But there is a new generation of text-to-speech that dispenses with the intonations of robots and sounds not only human, but unmistakably human, so that the listener cannot tell whether the voice is a speaker or a robot. (Or both.)
These developments are having a massive impact on the learning and development (L&D) industry, which previously had to use speakers, agencies or employees to record training content. In this chapter, you will learn what text-to-speech is and what its advantages are for L&D professionals like you.
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Text-to-Speech for L&D Professionals: The Next Frontier of Storytelling
Learn how to create inclusive online training experiences that engage your remote learners.
The challenge of the L&D professionals: Turning chaos into magic
L&D professionals have a big job. You need to convert immense amounts of information – often complex or dry in nature – into engaging, understandable, and digestible nuggets that grab employees’ attention, reflect the brand in a positive light, and make sure employees actually understand what they’re seeing or hear. All in a day of work, right?
To make matters even more challenging, it can be difficult to find the right voice to bring your content to life. Most companies are faced with the task of either spending thousands of dollars on a voice-over work agency, tracking down just the right voice-over artist, or finding someone with a decent voice and covering them with enough caramel macchiatos they want to include a few lessons.
Even if you manage to find the right speaker, you are usually out of luck when the content inevitably needs to be updated. Now you need to track down the same artist to exchange a few words and pay a few hundred dollars for them. (That is, if you can even find them.) It’s inefficient, it’s ineffective, and it’s a royal headache.
Fortunately (cue the computer trumpets) text-to-speech to the rescue.
What is text-to-speech?
Imagine a voice so lifelike that you honestly can’t tell if it is actually a human voice or an algorithm from the future. The transitions sound natural, the inflections are oh so gentle, and the voice is optimistic, reasonable or serious – the choice is yours.
Imagine being able to choose from these voices and personalities as you would with any other speaker. Good news: text-to-speech is here, and it’s all of these things and more.
Text-to-Speech is a technology that reads digital text aloud. With the push of a button, text-to-speech can translate words into human-sounding audio on a digital device. Artificial intelligence takes what can be achieved with speech synthesis and makes text-to-speech acceptable (and attractive) for creative productions.
6 benefits of text-to-speech for L&D professionals
Below are some of the benefits of text-to-speech for the L&D world.
Advantage # 1: Quality
Learning and development content is often the first point of contact that an employee has with a company when they come on board. Text-to-Speech helps you create high quality, interactive and fun training modules and position your brand as professional, current and competitive.
Benefit # 2: Commitment
Turning cybersecurity, law compliance, or harassment content into something that will grab employees’ attention and guide them through multiple modules is not an easy task. But with a more natural, human, and high quality voice, it’s a lot easier. Suddenly your modules come to life, your employees are engaged, your content is doing its job, and your workplace is safer and more secure. Everyone wins.
Benefit No. 3: Employee satisfaction and loyalty
The next generation of employees grew up with smartphones at their fingertips and have therefore set high standards when it comes to technological expectations. To be a competitive employer in the 21st century, your L&D materials can’t look or sound like they were from the 1900s. With modern text-to-speech, your content can position your company as the sought-after place where you can spend an entire career, work and grow.
Benefit # 4: True Understanding
It’s not just about keeping your employees entertained. It’s about making sure they can grasp complex issues and internalize them as part of your company’s process. With high quality text-to-speech, you can create materials that employees can better absorb and implement.
Benefit # 5: cost savings
Conventional methods of generating voice over are expensive. Paying for a voice over to change a few words every time you need a content update is downright inefficient. It’s just not inexpensive to create and update content this way. Text-to-Speech allows you to pay a flexible fee to convert your content to audio on demand, much like how you would simply pay to transcribe a podcast episode.
Benefit # 6: Workflow efficiency
Not only is it time-consuming and expensive to manage a voice production process, but reruns and content updates can slow down your overall schedule. You can’t afford to squeeze yourself back into an agency’s calendar every time you need a content update, nor is it exactly efficient to track down someone in a different department to cover you. With text-to-speech, you can quickly upload your content online and then receive an audio version – without calendar planning, booking appointments or renegotiating contracts.
Conclusion
Text-to-Speech offers a new alternative to L&D departments that want to save the time, cost, and complications of recording voice-over for training content. With the new frontier of human-sounding text-to-speech, L&D experts can convert their content with the customer into natural language at the push of a button, creating a more efficient workflow, a high-quality product and an all-round better employee experience.
Download the eBook Text-to-Speech For L&D Pros: The Next Frontier In Storytelling to learn how to use AI speech generators for your remote learning programs and drive employee engagement.
