From the course: Audition Essential Training

Creating computer-generated speech - Audition Tutorial

From the course: Audition Essential Training

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Creating computer-generated speech

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- [Instructor] More often than not, I'm editing a project well before a professional voiceover or narration is recorded. And so I'll need a temp voiceover to help me time out my edits. And for this, I often use the Generate Speech function. Now, it certainly won't replace professional voiceover artists, it's still going to sound artificial and slightly robotic, but it will save me having to record and re-record a voiceover while I settle on the script. So for this session that I have open, I need to add some voiceover to the very end. I'm just going to double-click my marker here to move my playhead to that point, and I'll also press the plus key just to zoom in and see this a bit better. And to add some speech to this section here I'm just going to select the track that I want to add the speech to, and then go up to my Effects menu, and choose Generate, Speech. I'm prompted to create a new audio file, so I'll call this VO Temp. And the sample rate looks good to me, I might set the channels to mono, because I don't need a stereo mix. And then I'll click OK. And this opens up the Generate Speech dialog box. So at the very top here I can choose from some presets, or I can go and customize my own speech settings. So I think I'll leave the language as United States, I'll set the gender to Female, and for voice I think I'll go with Samantha. And I should mention that all these options will be depended on what's loaded on your system. So what you're looking at may look different to what I have on my screen. And down in this text box I can type or paste in the narration that I need. I've already got mine typed out here, so I'll just go in and select all of this text. Select Copy. I'll jump back over to Audition, and I'll paste it using the shortcut Command + V or Control + V on Windows. And let's hear how this sounds. - [Samantha] For more information, visit projectrelo.com. - [Instructor] And that sounds good to me, if I want to adjust the speaking rate, I can increase the number of words per minute at the top here, and I can also play around with the volume if I want, but I'm pretty happy with all of this, so I'm going to click OK. And there's my temp voiceover file added into my session. Now at the last minute, I have changed my mind and I want to change just the start of this voiceover. But rather than going in and redoing the whole voiceover again, instead, I'm just going to change just this section in the waveform editor. So to open this clip in the waveform editor, I'll just double-click it, and then I'll select this first part of the speech. I'll bring up the Generate Speech dialog box again just by choosing Effects, Generate, Speech. I get a little warning here saying that this file is part of a multitrack session and it may throw things out of sync. I'm not concerned about that, so I'm going to click OK. And now what I want to write in this text box is just the new text I'll be adding. So I'm going to write, to find out more... And I want to make sure that I have this Replace option set here, I don't want this set to overlap or it's actually going to mix the two different versions together. So then I'll click OK, and it's replaced that selection with my new text. Let's have a listen to how that sounds. - [Samantha] To find out more, visit projectrelo.com. - [Instructor] Okay, that's much better. And probably while I'm here in the waveform editor, it's a good idea to save this file as well. If I look at this file over in the Files panel, you'll see it has a little asterisk next to it, and that means it has unsaved changes. If I close this session without saving that, I'm going to lose that file. So I'm just going to go up to my File menu, and choose "Save"... and I'll save this over to the working folder... in the exercise files, and I'll click Save. Now if I jump back to the multitrack editor, I have my temp VO with the updated text in there, let's have a listen to how this sounds. - [Male Voice] Relo chair. - [Samantha] To find out more, visit projectrelo.com. - [Instructor] Okay that sounds really good to me. And that's the Generate Speech function in Adobe Audition. It's certainly not going to put any voiceover artists out of work, but it's great to use as a guide track until you're happy with the script, and ready to hire a professional voiceover and an expensive recording studio.

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