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We partnered with NRC to develop custom AI voices that read the news to their audience. This collaboration stemmed from NRC's commitment to exploring innovative ways to deliver news and maintaining their high journalistic standards.
NRC’s reputation is built on delivering in-depth investigative journalism, critical analysis, and comprehensive coverage across various topics, including politics, economy, sports, culture, and science. The newspaper’s credibility and trustworthiness have made it a staple for many readers, including those with visual impairments or literacy challenges.
As consumer preferences shift towards convenience, audio news has become a vital medium. Audio allows people to stay informed while commuting, exercising, or doing household chores, providing a hands-free and eyes-free experience. However, NRC’s initial use of standard robotic voices from Microsoft revealed a need for more natural, engaging narrations that better captured the nuances of human speech.
NRC’s early experiments with Microsoft’s standard voices, Maarten and Fenna, provided valuable insights. While the concept was well-received, users noted that the standard voices sometimes lacked the natural intonation and emotion of a human narrator. This feedback highlighted the need for custom voices that could enhance the listening experience and strengthen NRC’s brand identity.
Over several months, our team worked closely with NRC to design and build custom AI voices. We began with extensive research, complementing NRC’s existing user studies, to understand their audience and brand. This research informed our creation of a neutral, on-brand tone of voice and helped us identify the perceptual values the voices needed to convey.
Choosing employees as voice talents from within NRC was a unique aspect of this project. We believed that leveraging the voices of NRC’s journalists and editors, who have deep contextual knowledge of the topics they cover, would add authenticity and authority to the narrations. This approach also ensured editorial consistency and strengthened the newspaper’s brand representation.
The process involved reaching out to interested NRC employees and selecting two voices through a data-driven and inclusive audition and casting process. We spent numerous hours in the studio, guided by our engineers and voice directors, to produce high-quality speech datasets. These datasets captured the unique characteristics of the chosen voices, which were then used to create custom voice models based on Deep Neural Networks.
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