What Happens When AI Takes the Boring VO Jobs? Voice Artists Thrive. AI voices are everywhere now. They’re smoother, cheaper, and getting pretty convincing. So it’s no surprise that some people are wondering: Is this the beginning of the end for real voiceover artists? Not even close. Yes, AI has a place in the industry - but it's not where the good stuff happens. In fact, I think it might actually make real voice talent more valuable. Let’s be honest: there’s plenty of voice work out there that no one’s passionate about. Endless phone menu prompts. Dry e-learning. Fifty variations of “Now on sale.” AI is perfect for that. Let it take those jobs. Most voiceover artists aren’t crying out to spend their day reading 37 versions of a product disclaimer. Let the bots handle the boring stuff. Because when it comes to real performance - telling a story, getting someone to feel something, hitting just the right tone shift - AI can’t compete. A human voice carries meaning, experience, and emotion in a way no algorithm can replicate. A good VO doesn’t just read lines - they live them. And listeners can tell. You can just feel it when it's real. There's also one other thing that an AI voice doesn't understand, and that's silence. A lot of people overlook it, but any seasoned voiceover pro knows how powerful a pause can be. It’s not dead air - it’s drama. It’s pacing. It’s breathing space. A human voice uses silence on purpose. AI? Not so much. It often treats it like a glitch - awkward, empty, or just plain weird. But a well-placed pause? That’s part of the performance. And even if one day AI does learn to hit those little human nuances on command - how much work will that actually take? Will it need multiple rounds of direction, endless prompts, technical tweaks? At what point does the “quick and cheap” option become slow, fiddly, and frustrating? The balance can tip easily. I think it’ll just be quicker (and better) to get a real human to nail it first time. Clients say they want voices that are warm, natural, trustworthy. Those aren’t technical specs or prompts - they’re feelings. They come from instinct, not from programming. If you're telling a powerful story, selling a dream, or trying to move someone emotionally, you need a human touch. No synthetic voice is pulling that off - at least not yet. Here at Transmission, we work with brilliant voice artists all the time, and I think their craft has never been more relevant. Let the tech take the robotic reads - that just makes more space for the human stuff that really matters. Because in the end, people don’t connect with perfection. They connect with people. #Voiceovers #Performance #Humans #AI
Chas Rowe
10mo
Hmmm. May I respectfully disagree? AI is not perfect for phone menu prompts or e-learning, or any other human voice-over medium. It is, however, the perfect, careless intermediary for guaranteed audience alienation and meaningless communication. As an example, just call Natwest and listen to the AI on-hold 'voice'. The intonation is so all over the place, it's like it's not really English at all. If you want human-to-human connection (and you want your banking done more efficiently actually), you call First Direct. You get through to a human within a short number of rings and you get your question dealt with. AI 'voices' are fundamentally unrelatable, because they are not human-powered, not delivered live and not even alive. There's no boring VO work; there's just bored VOs, or bad VOs, or both, and VOs who can't interpret copy and can't empathise with their audience. There's also bad writing. And below those two, there's AI. So maybe we actually agree after all?
Al Black
11mo
Couldn't agree more Lee Climpson! As synthetic voices absorb the high-volume, low-skill projects the overall market will shrink. Those amateur, “anyone-with-a-mic” jobs will be taken by AI. What will remain is premium VA jobs that reward human nuance and lived-in emotion. And that means true professionals won’t just survive; they’ll become a scarcer and more valuable asset than ever.
Michael Ashtiany
11mo
100% agreed, I really think those worrying about Ai taking their jobs are catastrophizing too much for the reasons you mentioned. The Jobs it'll take are probably the ones you weren't doing much of anyway And for those that are trying Ai because its cheaper I'm finding are already coming back. Because yes it was cheaper, but actually the overall quality just doesn't cut it. I don't think it'll be long before the dust settles and we find a balance where a good VO will continue to be the preferred and Ai is used a scratch read in early production
Melissa Exelberth
10mo
There is no VO or narration job that has to be boring. Even a technical script not written for the voice. No one sets out to write a boring script and while the subject may not be interesting to many it was to the writer. And it's up to the performer - challenging though it may be - to find and tell the story of that script. The story the writer wanted to tell. Everything has a story. It's up to the performer to bring it out and provide the connection.
Bruce Duncan
11mo
Lee Climpson I admire your positivity, but the problem I have with this is that, sadly, "it's good enough" has become acceptable now to so many. The quality of TV/video/audio dropped during Covid because nothing could be made professionally (remember Jamie Oliver making a show in his kitchen on his iphone? 😩). The bar has been lowered and AI stepped in at the same time. Add to that a slash in budgets (across every genre) and it doesn't matter a bean how good a story-teller I am, or how I can move you emotionally - if Production Companies are folding (or at least struggling) then 'good enough' will meet with 'is it cheap enough?' Let's all hope that we can all thrive again soon. Even doing the boring stuff.
Leonie Schliesing
11mo
I'm sure you didn't meant to appear quite so flippant about this, but e-learning is a genre that plenty of people are incredibly passionate about. I know some voice actors who have built their entire businesses around narrating e-learning. I personally love doing it as well, I always learn something new and I enjoy teaching. It's acting the part of an instructor just as much as a video game job. So I don't know if lumping e-learning in with "the boring stuff" is quite the right choice. From the listener's side, following an hour long online course is challenging anyway. It would be even more challenging with a "my ears glaze over after 2 minutes" AI voice. I know for many it's about the bottom line more than anything else. But while AI voices can potentially be good use cases in some areas, I don't believe e-learning is one of them.
Kathryn Vinclaire
11mo
E-learning is only dry if you get a VO who doesn't give a toss about e-learning. There are definitely VO's who dont enjoy corporate work, or IVR, or terms and conditions. But there are many that do, myself included. As much as you could say the industry will improve if VO's only have to do the "fun" jobs while the "boring" scripts are ready by AI, I'm not sure everyone would agree. Principally the people who work in those sectors of this hugely diverse industry. We are so not just here for one interpretation of what we might find fun.
An interesting take. I love eLearning, and it earnt me a full time income for a while. I think the ones losing out now are the people who have to sit through AI-narrated (or not narrated at all) training courses, because they're bored AND because they're less likely to learn the content. The human touch you speak of is extremely important for actually taking in information and being able to remember it. I'm also doing more IVR/voicemail than ever before. I have a feeling this is the genre that's the first to reach the tipping point of "we're gosh-darn sick of the AI voices!" - because it's been used here longest. It's no longer novel or bearable to ring a business and try to talk to a robot, it's OLD and annoying. Which will become the story in the other genres you call "boring", too, soon enough. Anyway. I also really love your comment about silence. Some of my favourite parts of speeches - and some songs - are the little tiny perfectly-placed silences.