A professional voice services firm like Marketing Messages can and will go to all reasonable lengths to give its clients the best professional voice recordings possible. But even with trained voice talents and expert audio engineers combining their wealth of first-hand experience, there is still no guarantee that the completed audio is going to sound exactly like what the client expected to hear when they wrote their latest natural language IVR application. This is not a matter of skill or effort, but of basic human truths. Voice User Interface (VUI) designers have specific visions for their projects, and those visions can be difficult to fully capture, even with written instructions. For those situations, the best approach is to ask about putting together a coaching session. Coached voice recording sessions are the ideal way to capture the exact sound you are looking for in your conversational IVR prompts.
What Is a Coached Voice Recording Session?
A coached voice recording session is precisely what it sounds like: A recording session during which the client is present alongside the voiceover talent and the audio engineer and can give live feedback and instruction as to how their script should be performed.
Recording the script in this way virtually guarantees that there will be no errors in the final audio. Mistakes in the scripting can be caught in real-time. The desired speed, tone, and energy can be fine-tuned until it is exactly what the client wants to hear. Suddenly, all the surprise and guesswork has been taken out of the audio recording experience.
This is especially ideal for IVR prompts since the voice user interface IVR prompts are often composed of sentence fractures that will be connected via automated, pre-recorded audio. The prompts themselves make very little sense unless you know how they are going to fit together and what existing audio tracks are going to be used to join them together. And without knowing what the script means, the voice talent and production staff can only make educated guesses about how the script should be performed.
Everybody Wins
A coached session is the very definition of an ‘everybody wins’ scenario. Obviously, the client gets their audio precisely as they always imagined it, with every kink and quirk ironed out during the session. When the final audio is received, the client knows precisely what they will get, making the installation and implementation process much simpler.
But from the behind-the-scenes perspectives, the people working on the audio win too. Voiceover talents and production staff appreciate coached sessions just as, if not more, than the clients. Having the client there to give notes and instruction means that everyone involved in the project can have a totally clear vision of the objective that they are chasing, and then work together to bring that vision into being. This is exponentially preferable to endless rounds of emails and phone calls trying to encapsulate tastes and preferences or having to redo the same audio multiple times to make corrections and changes.
Our Recent Success
Just this past month, Marketing Messages had the opportunity to do one of our most in-depth coaching sessions ever. The massive project involved hundreds upon hundreds of IVR prompts, with different sessions for both English and Spanish voiceover talents.
Because of the ease and convenience of modern technology, we could set up a session that involved a VUI designer in Seattle, a company representative in Texas, a voice talent in Connecticut, and an audio engineer in Maine. I mean, we’re talking about a group of people who are about as separate as people can get!
And yet, the sessions were a smashing success, and the massive project was able to go on without a hitch. Mistakes and errors in the script were caught on the fly. The VUI designer and the client’s brand representative were able to explain where in the call flow each prompt of the IVR script was, enabling a better and more cohesive vocal performance. Everyone could get on the same page and drive towards the same shared goal.
Set Up Your Own Coached Voice Recording Session Today
Coached sessions are the ideal way for any conversational script designer to get the exact sound they want from our voice talents. So, contact us today about setting up your own coaching session, so you can get your audio, just the way you want it.