Voice banking has grown more and more popular over the years and new technologies and AI are making it easier than ever to bank your voice. But you might be asking, what is voice banking?
Voice banking is a process of creating your own ‘personalised synthetic voice’ or an AI version of your own voice. Basically, it’s a computer-generated version of your voice. It means that if you need a communication aid, such as an iPad with text to speech technology, instead of using a generic voice like Siri, you could use your own synthetic voice, so that when speaking through your communication aid or device it would sound more authentically you.
So, how do you bank your voice? There are lots of different programmes and apps that can be used to bank your voice and with new technologies being developed everyday it can be hard to keep up with all the new programmes.
Basically, you pick a programme or app to use. It gives you a list of sentences to say and it records you saying them. The list of sentences usually ranges from 350 sentences up to 1200 sentences. A few years ago this process used to take a long time, but it can be completed in just an hour now. Of course, if the person is fatigued or their speech is slow they will need a little longer to complete this and might want to do it in short bursts to save energy.
The programmes we often use are Acapela, Speak Unique, Model Talker and Voice Keeper. These programmes vary in price point and how long it takes to complete the voice banking. However, Apple have recently announced free voice banking can be completed on their devices from Autumn 2023. This is very exciting news and could be a real game changer for people who want or need to bank their voice! We’ll keep you updated as we learn more information about it. And of course, if you’d like help or support to bank your voice, then please do contact us via the contact form on our website.
