Radio Drops #18: You Be Your A.I. Voices

You Can Be Another Person

If you aren’t satisfied with your voice, if you don’t like the way you sound on the radio….well, now you can just become someone else. If you want a BIG voice, you can be it. If you need an English woman to voice a liner, you can be that, too!

Watch the video on YouTube: Radio Drops #18: You Be Your A.I. Voice

All of These Voices Are Me

You should be jealous of me, because I never worked for a radio station where I didn’t have at least four other voices I could count on for commercials. We produced a lot of commercials in-house, and I needed those voices for promos too. Having a variety of voices on the air was just a natural thing. You couldn’t run an all-music, all-the-time radio station without at least five full-time DJs.

All that began to change when the United States Congress decided to change the Communications Act, so the limited band space, a natural resource then and now, could be sold off to venture capitalists. They did what they do: fired as many people as they could as quickly as they could, automated as much as possible, and started stamping out radio stations like plastic toys on a Chinese assembly line.

I’m sitting here between two major markets, Austin and San Antonio. Listening to corporate radio around here, the commercials seem to be predominantly national spots. But when I hear a local spot or a local promo, it seems like the station has one male voice and one female voice for everything done in-house. That’s because there ain’t nobody else in the building.

They’re very good voices, for sure. There’s just not enough variety. The station imaging and the promos are all done by that one guy from Cincinnati. I think great radio stations need a variety of voices. Different voices make your station more interesting, more colorful, if you will.

And for folks running internet radio stations, you have your own voice, which you might not be too thrilled with, and maybe the voice of one other person you can count on.

I say all that as preamble, because I have found the first valuable thing AI can do for me as someone running a radio station: give me truly human voices.

Aha, you say, but we’re hearing a lot of AI voices now, and you can always tell when it’s not human, can’t you? There’s a verbal comma out of place, an obvious mispronunciation, the accent on the wrong syllable. The worst thing about AI voices is that they have no personality. When you hear them, you can’t mentally picture the face behind the voice.

Listen to this lady voicing a promo about hearing an old-time, old-school rock and roll song at least once an hour, sometimes twice an hour, right here in San Marcos, Texas. Can you see her? For me, she’s about 30, maybe 35, with reddish hair, and she sounds like she’s from Texas. That’s Jessica, and she is me. Then here’s my original track, the same promo in my own voice.

The one thing that was always in short supply for me in radio was female voices. For whatever reason, there have never been a lot of girls who went looking for on-air jobs in music radio. AI can solve that problem. If I want a classy lady from London saying some good things about my radio station, well, here’s Lily.

And I don’t have to be the same guy either. Here’s a man-in-the-street, non-announcer Texas guy, and that’s another version of me as well.

I’m using ElevenLabs. That’s Eleven, spelled out. I record my voice track, feed it up, pick out the voice I want, and that voice reads it back to me. As it’s read back, I record it, dress it up a little, and there you have it.

If you were born with a voice you don’t like, this is the solution. You can voice all the promos and all the imaging on your radio station with a lot of personality, in the announcer’s voice you choose.

More on this: My Critique of an All A.I. Radio Station

For the middle third of my career, I was an independent radio programming consultant. Managers and owners hired guys like me to improve the sound and the ratings of their radio stations. One of the things I did was to prepare written critiques of my client station. I’d get cassettes with 60 minute airchecks; tapes of the stations. I’d listen and inventory everything and prepare detailed reports like the one you see below. I haven’t done one of these things in over a decade, but after listening to big broadcaster Audacy’s “all AI” station, I decided to study what the non-human did with a Classic Country station. From the short biz news report I saw about the station, apparently the machine does it all, from the voice imaging and liner-writing, to the music-picking and scheduling.

My comments about what I’ve heard are in bold font, but in the scans below it is not easy to see that clearly.