🔊 3 Step Text to Voiceover Process | Twitter Competitor - What We Know So Far

Welcome back Marketeers.

We're back again with insights into more marketing tools and concepts - helping you keep your finger on the pulse.

In today’s newsletter:

📌 3 steps to create a near-perfect voiceover from text (and in any language)

📌 Latest social media news

📌 3 Step Text to Voiceover Process

If you read last week's newsletter, you know how invaluable rapid prototyping can be when working with ideas and concepts.

With that in mind, there are many ways to get to our end goal - a useable voiceover. But for the sake of time (and word count) I will use what I consider to be the best to date - ElevenLabs.

If you're using social media, namely TikTok, you will already be familiar with some of the 'robotic' voices out there.

But don't worry that's not what I'm going to give you. Our aim is to create a video with a voiceover that:

• Does not sound like an automated phone line from the 90's

• Can be personable and professional alike

• Easy to produce

• Be used as a guide or a final product (depending on your standards)

Step 1: Prep Your Script

I'm going to use the following quote to get us started, but it should give you an idea how you can create your own fully fledged script.

"The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity."- Amelia Earhart

As I mentioned, it's all about text to voiceover which means it's time to get experimenting.

I didn't land on a quote from Amelia Earhart out of admiration for the talented aviator alone, it was the structure of the quote itself.

As a sentence, it's meaty enough for the technology to recreate convincingly. I have found that short sentences (3-4 word) tend to perform poorly. And importantly, this quote uses grammer to break up the sentence.

Punctuation such as commas afford humans an opportunity to take a breath in between speaking, and that's what the technology recreates here. Making it sound more natural and significantly less robotic.

Step 2: Using The Technology

The user interface is as simple as it comes. Below I've highlighted the key areas and functions you will need to know about.

1. Voice Name - Generate your own style or use one from the Voice Library.

2. Settings - Because the technology is generative, these settings effect how similar each voice is between each generation. No need to touch these for now unless you're feeling risky.

3. Model - ElevenLabs is currently on v1 of their model (so no changes here).

4. Your Text - Add your script here, up to 5,000 words at a time.

5. Then hit 'Generate'

Step 3: The Result

Here's what you have been waiting for:

Then here is the same quote read by a female voice:

I should make it clear, what ElevenLabs gives you is an audio file. How you choose to use it after that is up to you.

Let's Go Multilingual

These days your product or service is meant for the world, which does mean you're going to come across a language barrier at some point.

So why not publish the same content in French, German, Italian, Spanish etc.

The 'Model' I referred to in the previous step can be switched from exclusively English, to a Multilingual mode.

But how good is it really? Good news, I've done the leg work and will now show you an example.

One quick trip to Google Translate and I have a translation for my quote.

Following the same process as before on ElevenLabs, except changing the model to multilingual, and I've got a great result ready to go.

Examples In the Wild

Just to show you that it really works, here is an example of content we created for tech brand Smoothie Lab.

First the piece of content in the King's English 🇬🇧

We also produced the content in several languages including, German, Spanish and Italian 🇮🇹 🤌

Working in this way ensured we were able to publish content with a very quick turnaround and to reach a larger audience by tailoring for other languages.

I hope you can take this super simple approach and apply it to your own projects.

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📌 Social Media Update

Meta plans to launch a Twitter competitor - Threads.

Expectations are that the new app will launch this Thursday (6th July). Screenshots of the app show a similar dashboard to Twitter and Meta has described Threads as a "text based conversation app".

Head over to Threads.net and you'll be greated by a countdown for 1000 ET / 1500 BST on the 6th.

We'll have to see whether people want yet another platform and if it's a hit with users and brands alike.