I wasn't sure where to post this and since I am looking to find some help this felt like the right place.

I am having fun animating with a variety of tools and content but doing it on my own I am having trouble with doing the voices and I want to find people who will help me record some dialogue.

I did well in the Halloween animation contest coming second and am putting something together for the current Xmas contest and am looking for a couple of female voices as I don't have that range covered :)

I am looking for one versatile voice that could do a couple of characters or two people.

I do not want to pay for this help but I would be willing to share some of the prize winnings if we were lucky enough to win anything.

Please let me know if you are interested. Time is unfortunately short although I have not finalised a script yet but I want to get that done and get someone organised by next week. The animation is likely to only run for 2 minutes with only a couple of words and a sentence or two required so it is not a huge commitment.

Sorry if this is the wrong spot for this post.

But please get in touch.

Cheers MangeyD

moving this to Animation forum for you .. might give you more succes finding what you need for your project :)

Thanks, although I don't think this is the right forum for it as I am not trying to reach out to animators. The sort of people that are likely to help could be anyone on here.

With the short timeframes left I am already thinking about major changes to what I was hoping to put together.

Oh good luck with that. I use my Aussie friend who has an amazing voice, could have been a professional and my 9 year old granddaughter.

Maybe if you specify what kind of voices you are looking for people might respond more.

Anyways looking forward to seeing what you create!

voices.com

thanks for the responses. I got a friend to help but I left myself very short of time and am currently pulling it all back to get something finished. I looked on Fiverr and there are loads of people on there offering voice overs so for anything important I might go there or voices.com.

@anniemation I am an Aussie and used a friend so I guess I too used an Aussie friend. I think everyone needs an Aussie friend :)

So true!

My Aussie friend did the voice over for this video:

A Christmas Cat Tale

Very cool!

Maybe I should have just done a narration. It may have been easier. I still may find it easier as I assemble this beast but we shall see.

Thanks for sharing. :)

There was a excellent Ai (Artificial intelligent) text to voice. engine i used it a lot called https://www.voicery.com/ . Multi Lingual, & languages and customizable speech patterns but unfortunately since covid-19 they have shut down their site in Oct. its a real shame because it truly was a great AI TXT to speech engine . But there is quiet a few of them on the internet. unfortunately any of them that are worth anything also cost big $$$

I have never seen an AI text to voice engine that I liked as it is so hard to be expressive with them. it's ok for straight forward text but not if it is too complex. I ended up getting some help from a friend which was great but I ran out of time and had to compromise on a lot of my original plans. TBH the audio was slapped together far too quickly over scenes that all still needed lots more love and attention... but hey this is just for fun and as a learning exercise so in the end I was fairly happy with it all.

@poisinivy, I found a good AI text to voice service that is offering a trial that includes 30 minutes of free voicing and what I saw in their demo clip was very impressive. You can even create a replica voice by recording yourself (or someone else) reading some of their scripts so they can create an AI voice out of it.

https://replicastudios.com/

here is what their free account gives you 30 minutes of generated speech Access to all default voices Creation of 1 Replica Voice Unlimited projects

Their pricing is not too bad. $20pm for 4 hours of speech generation.... or $24 to buy an ad hoc 4 hour block. I was going to be up for around $15 to hire someone on Fiverr and I don't expect I would have got anywhere near 4 hours of speech out of them so this doesn't sound too bad. At any rate if the project is serious $20 or so is reasonable to get some voice acting that was more impressive than I expected it to be.

I know exactly what you mean about using Robot voices . I not a fan of it either , But as technology improves I am finding it good for quick filll. I use MS Azure mostly it has 248 different voices delict an customizable emotions such as whining and raising ones voice. I have a Microsoft Azure account for my website so it does not cost me anything to use it . But you do need to know a little about Azure Scripting to acess all the functions But you can check the demo out here for yourself .

But like you said nothing beats real people as voice actors. and Back 10 or 15 years ago I could find tons of people willing to do it for free. But now days everyone want to make a bucks. So it leave a artist in a tough spot. when it comes time for actors.

@poisinivy, Thanks for the link to the MS Azure service I will have to check it out. I have also found one for AWS Polly that has a plug-in for UE4 that I may investigate too as I am using UE4 a lot at the moment.

I think the friend that helped me on my animation entry for the Xmas contest is likely to be wiling to help me in future and she sounds great... unlike me who did the rest of the voices!!! If she will help in future I really don't need to much more.

Anyway you can't beat a real voice but I am very impressed by how far they have come recently with AI text to speech so I will keep monitoring that and find an affordable option... although as you say for artists and hobbyists free is the most affordable :)

It looks like Polly isn't that good. will look at the MS Azure demo now

Wasn't overly impressed with Azure either actually. If you haven't looked at the Replica Demo I strongly recommend it as it is far better and far more usable than either AWS or Azure. It actually could voice a character through a range of emotions.

https://replicastudios.com/

@dammu5 I am very sorry but I didn't understand what you were asking for help with.

Please try to ask again and I will try to understand you as best as I can :)