VoiceBunny: Fast and professional voiceovers (with an API). | Hacker News Reader

VoiceBunny: Fast and professional voiceovers (with an API).

voicebunny.com

130 pointsph0rque50 comments

I've been using Voice123 for professional voiceovers for a few years now (podcast intros, bumpers, IDs, etc). The talent on there is top-notch, and I always get a large number of responses very quickly.

As much as I like the design of VoiceBunny, I feel compelled by a sense of loyalty to the hard workers who created Voice123 to point out what an outstanding company they've been for a very long time.

http://voice123.com/

VoiceBunny is apparently owned by Voice123...look at the logo.

Thank you Jayson! You made my day (and the day of our team!) I'm one of the co-founders of Voice123 (and now also co-founder of VoiceBunny). Some of the great talent you can find in Voice123 is also available in VoiceBunny. While Voice123 continues to focus on its online casting service (we're rewriting the Voice123 codebase from scratch!), VoiceBunny is meant to allow you to automate the process of getting voices via its API.

I could see implementing this for Appointment Reminder just to avoid all the overhead that goes into organizing some Fiverr voice actress (who, contrary to what you would expect from the price, typically deliver work perfectly adequate for a telephone call) and getting their .mp3s into the system for a new client. Otherwise I was literally going to have to hire a VA just to push buttons to make that happen.

I use Fiverr for all of our phone message / voiceover work and it really did impress - to think that these guys can make money doing 100 words for $4 (after fiverr's cut) is pretty crazy.

The only thing that could be more desired is a faster turn around time, although I'm not willing to pay 10 times the amount that this is estimating.

Hello Mat. VoiceBunny co-founder her. We tried to identify good talent at Fiverr to invite them over to VoiceBunny, but we found only a handful of good voices out of over 300 people that were offering their voiceover services there. How did you find good voices there? We would like to invite them to VoiceBunny so that you get the same low Fiverr prices with the added benefits of the API and VoiceBunny's 100% money-back guarantee.

Dude, not cool at all.

There's a massive difference between highlighting your USP and insulting your competitors.

I don´t see how he insulted, he´s just pointing a fact. Voiceover quality is not exceptional.

Fiverr is not a direct competitor either, you can get all sorts of things there apart from voiceovers, for example you can get book covers, video recordings of people writing whatever you want on their body, pictures of your logo in front of the taj mahal... its quite cool.

Sounds like we have a different understanding of "good" voices - I found four or five quickly and picked "naplesdave"

I don't think you are giving me the same low fiverr price, considering the estimate I had yesterday was in the $45 range for my sample script...

For automating your "Appointment Reminder", this API is useful. But for offline voice overs for marketing purposes, Fiverr is still cheaper.

The use case is automating the pre-recording of a voice snippet which will be used hundreds of times. Fiverr is not cheaper: $5/$10 for vocal talent, $200+ for me to interrupt my schedule five times to find the talent, explain the task, check the deliverable, upload it, and receive OK from the client.

I'd much rather spend two days hooking up the API so that this is entirely self-serve for my customers.

For those of you interested this is an API that interacts with a VoiceOver crowd. You send the text and, for a fee, it gets turned into a professional voiceover in a matter of minutes.

What you can do with it is things like this --> http://avc.fm , turn Fred Wilson´s blog into a podcast almost in real time.

Submitting that first post (The Engineer's Brain), the 459 words are quoted as $61.2 (+20% service fee) = $73.44

Talents need a Facebook account to identify on VoiceBunny -- and there are no other options.

How many blog posts explaining why this is wrong do we need before this crazyness stops?

All those posts have been wrong though. Just because it rockets on HN doesn't mean it's true.

Yeah. It seems if people are forced into doing something to be able to earn money that's enough incentive. It's a little silly, but maybe it allows them to better curate people / review applications?

I wonder if an economically sound business could be made in taking top web content and "converting" it into podcasts.

My thoughts on the subject (from March 2011): http://www.yarone.com/2011/03/recording-top-web-content-plai...

that is a good idea, you should try and make it happen

I chuckled at your use of the word "dictator" :)

Great idea btw, would love to be a part of it.

There was a site called hearablog.com (https://twitter.com/#!/hearablog) which narrated some of the more famous tech blogs. Jason discussed it on This Week in Startups: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTn5qNeHny4

I personally think that this is a neat idea but VoiceBunny isn't the ideal tool. You pay about $70 for 400 words which is about the length of a short-mid sized blog post. If you just cover 5 posts per day, you will need to invest about $10k per month in VoiceBunny. At this point, looking for your own voice actors is probably cheaper.

Hi! VoiceBunny co-founder here. Our marketplace is new and the median prices are coming down on a weekly basis as more talents compete for work. Also, you are free to set the prices you want to pay. For ideas like hearablog.com, we are also implementing a royalty-based system, where talents get paid as the recording makes money for our client.

On Fiverr you can find many gigs by people who can give Professional Voice overs for just 5$

Professional voiceovers should cost more than five dollars.

I wouldn't expect quality from anyone that would do a $5 voiceover, and I'd be insulting a professional to ask them to work for that price.

That's free market economics for you. You also get what you pay for.

Most of those I found at fiverr are recorded at home and not in a good studio setup. For simple voice overs for selling those $1 ebook etc, fiverr is good option. But for a bigger business, its better to look else where.

Price level change in Voicebunny according to market conditions, and they will get a bit lower in time, but I´m pretty certain that the fiverr talent is not very professional..

At Typecaster, we're working on a similar service: providing blogs, newspapers, and other websites with professional audio recordings of their content.

If you're interested, visit http://www.typecaster.net or email info@typecaster.net and we'll be in touch.

Wow this is expensive. Over a dollar a word. "what time is it" costs 6$.

I actually looked into their other company, voice123 to do some audio corpus building for a speech recognition project but it was way cheaper(though painful) to just use amazon turk.

Smaller jobs imply larger overhead; you're testing an edge case.

Estimating "quick recordings" of some random strings in their calculator I see roughly: 5 words for $8, 100 words for $35, 200 words for $45, 800 words for $70, 3200 words for $160 (~$0.05/word).

Sexy. Thanks - I was wondering this. :)

whoa... interesting... did it work out? I mean could you crowdsource voice recognition? In the case of voicebunny words are cheaper on longer texts so you could probably get a better price for reads that are in the thousands of words range. Of course, in here you will pay higher prices for higher quality

I needed to build a audio corpus to train acoustic models on. It actually worked pretty good. I was able to build up about 100 hours worth. It was unbelievably tedious because I had to verify the audio even after I used amazon turk a second time to do a first verification pass.

The other thing is that I don't necessarily want perfect quality audio. I wanted whatever microphone audio normal people have so it probably worked out better that I used amazon turk.

Very interesting, I´m thinking that voicebunny would be useful to these types of projects because you can ask recordings on specific language accents.

Also Voicebunny also has a quality check and a guarantee included in the service.

I like the competition idea. For those who can cover the price, being able to choose from a few options presented to you might feel like a better option. And, unlike 99designs it seems, the talent is rewarded whether they're selected or not.

You can only register / "verify your identity" by logging on by Facebook from what I can tell (for talents). A Facebook profile can easily be faked just like any other.

Yeah. I run a home recording studio and everything, and I got to the facebook login page and went... pffftttt. CLOSE. Why not just have user accounts?

Hello! VoiceBunny co-founder here. We're trying to figure out a way to avoid some talents from abusing the system by having multiple accounts. Forcing them to login with Facebook helped us reduce the abuse. We'll remove the Facebook requirement soon as we come up with new solutions.

Very interesting idea. We have a real estate photography platform and people ask us about voice all the time. Interestingly, almost no one does it due to the expense and the PITA factor.

The idea of an API to attempt to automate that is interesting. Will have to check it out!

[Edit] Question: if I have a single "tour" but want it in 10-20 chunks by the same talent is that possible? We would tie each chunk to a single picture.

Interesting like batch projects? I think that VoiceBunny might be planning this at some point in the future :p

Hello! We would love to tweak our API for this kind of project. When you post a project, we could allow you to submit an array of scripts, thus allowing you to get an individual MP3 file for each entry. Email us at api@voicebunny.com when you have a chance.

On the issue of 'contest' based content; It's am incredible waste of good quality work. I hope everybody who submits good work is compensated in some manner.

It looks like they do since the cost of the project goes up considerably when it's a contest.*

* Source: http://voicebunny.com/projects/pricing

[edit: added source page]

Actually, it's a bit more expensive than buying N single recordings of the same text. Strange.

Okay, I'm loving the idea. I can see this being great for indi stuff. Probably less hassle than hiring VO talent and a studio.

How do you pay the voiceover providers? I mean, how does it work legal-wise? Are they considered sole proprietors? Employees? Something completely different?

sole proprietors, they are a crowd of freelancers

I don't know how that works in the US, but here in the Sweden becoming a sole proprietor can be somewhat of a hassle. You have to sign forms, talk to the "IRS", pay a certain amount of preliminary taxes each month, do book-keeping, keep track of inbound/outbound VAT on invoices, etc. It doesn't deter someone who really wants to be an entrepreneur, but it does stop people who would just like to do some casual work on the side for a few bucks here and there.

I have quite a few business ideas involving paying the crowd to do stuff, but the legal issue is a barrier.

It's MUCH easier in the US.

What's a good solution for me then? Incorporate in the US?

Is anyone else reminded of The Diamond Age?

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