Okay, I admit. I don’t like my own voice – especially when I’m doing screen-capture with my own voice narration.

Although English is the lingua franca in Singapore, it’s one that I often suffer the tip-of-the-tongue syndrome.

Perhaps, it’s due to my very logical and engineer-trained mind, coupled with the multi-cultural and chinese/dialect speaking environment, I don’t quite have the flair in fluent verbal articulation that will enjoy a standing ovation.

Nevertheless, as an educator/trainer, there are many occasions that I’d need to produce (how-to) video tutorials.

I remembered my very first complete e-Business video tutorial series a decade ago was made with screen recording and 100% text-to-speech combo. It took me a loooong time, in fact, it was like a full 2-month, just to complete the videos. It was quite “well done” (by standard of those good old time), just that the text-to-speech was kind of roo-boo-tic.

Over the years, I’ve made quite a handful of videos. As time is not a luxury, I’ve “made peace” with my asian Singlish accent on most of my how-to videos.

But there are times that I would need a much better voiceover for my videos – especially sales/marketing videos on key products/landing pages. Those are the videos that I feel would need higher quality professional voiceover.

Outsourcing voiceover is out-of-the-question as I know the cost will be steep.

Until I come across a Facebook ads on this text-to-speech SaaS (software as a service) called Speechelo – offering at a one-time fee of $67 (it happened to be $47 with this link).

Without much hesitation, I’ve dived in and purchased it.

The key question now is – is Speechelo worth it? Quick answer : I’m impressed!

Just spent ~2hr in total this morning to write out a simple sales script for one of my projects, cut-n-paste it to Speechelo, left everything in default (English US, AI Voice Engine, Friendly AI Tone, Billy Joey Male and click “GENERATE VOICE OVER” – damned, the conversion was fast – it just take like less than 2-sec?! And I got my MP3 done and downloaded.

Okay, I invested another hour to re-edit the script, inserted punctuations to give more pauses for clearer voiceover … happy with my final MP3 :

[s3mm type=”audio” files=”uas.mp3″ /]

See … or should I say “hear” … the voiceover is good right?!

I then head over to Powerpoint to come out with a simple caption-style slides, fire up my Camtasia and after another hour, I’ve got my marketing video live in my sales page.

So for now, my strategy is simple. For marketing video, Speechelo will be the anchor for my voiceover. And for those step-by-step screen recording how-to video tutorials – to expedite video production, I’d just settle down with my Singlish “monotonous” narration … hey! it’s not easy to think thru’ the process, click the right interface and narrate all at the same time; hence, I’ve to deliberately tone-down to get the “job” (videos) done.

In conclusion, I’m glad with my purchase of Speechelo and I’m definitely gonna have more fun using it to create my professional voiceover videos.