Susan Bennett / Siri: Hello. You have a new email from Generic Incorporated. Do you want
to reply?
A siri-like voice is still, at this point in time, basically fairly robotic. Most people
who just hear me on a daily basis don't recognize me as the original voice of siri because the
pitch is...
A little bit lower. Siri talks down here a little bit.
It's not as evenly paces as if you were speaking naturally – there are little what I like
to call bumps. And the concatenated voices that came before Siri were very, very robotic.
You'd hear things like [robot voice] Hello. How. Are. You.
You know, you would never say, Hello, you have three appointments for today. You'd say
"hey, you've got three appointments today."
Well, when you see a direction that says very peppy and energetic, so of course that's what
you do, that would be a younger-sounding voice than my regular speaking voice, so I would
pitch it a little bit higher.
[Fake Ad]: Sometimes when you walk through the grocery aisle, those other water brands
just all seem the same. They're flashy and desperate when you just want something refreshing.
That's why you should drink Generic Water. The water that doesn't try to be anything
it's not.
I would pitch it a little bit higher – pitch it in my head, instead of in my chest – la,
la, la, la, la – see and all of the sudden you hit your break and then you'd have to
go into falsetto. La- la-la-la-la-la. You can tell very much from the copy what kind
of person they're looking for. It's important for you to keep in your mind who you're talking
to.
Typically, we associate a deeper voice with authority.
[Fake Ad]: You think you know the truth about Jake Gerald. But who really controls him?
In the last year, he's taken more than $100,000 from corporate bigwigs, at Generic Incorporated.
Who do you want to represent you? Somebody who listens to the people? Or someone who
listens to Big Water?
In this case, the voice actor needs to sound urgent – it's taken such a long time for
women to really break into this aspect of voiceover because people generally think of
authority voices as male. Fortunately, that has changed.
But, [high voice] you're not going to get someone talking like that and saying "you
think you know the truth about Jake Gerald, but who really controls him?"
It's not a person you probably would.. run into on a daily basis.
[Fake ad]: Listen up. You think you know the best water around? You have no idea. Generic
water's the hot new thing from Miami to Ft. Lauderdale. Guys and girls everywhere are
saying the same thing. Let's get generic!
That one was just a – yeah – that was a little over the top. [Laughs]. Adding breath,
yeah breath and just a real edge. A real edge to the voice. You know, suddenly you're the
monster. You know? You will drink the water.
So people that do voice acting for a living have to think about all those things. About
the pitch, and the tone, and the pacing, the cadence of their speech, who their audience
is, who they're speaking to. It's perhaps a little bit more challenging than people
might imagine.