Human Wins!

So, allow me to paraphrase for the sake of better eLearning in 2024 and 25: give me your tired script, your huddled instructional designers yearning to hire a human voice to read it, the wretched AI voiceover your client wants to use, send these to me…

…and let a professional voice actor give the client something tangibly human to their learners and employees.

Last week, a client explained that an enterprise client had a difficult technical script that they insisted on having narrated by AI. The script was close to 30 minutes long.

My client explained what a lot of clients don’t know: that AI still gets so many things wrong, beginning with emphasis and continuing through pronunciation, that have to be “repaired” manually after review, that it’s more efficient to use a human narrator on this kind of content from the get-go.

So, I offered the client the same service I’ve offered other clients in the same situation: I asked them to allow me to record a short excerpt of the course at no cost and let the client do an A/B comparison.

In most cases, there’s no contest; the human narration wins. That happened in this case, and I recorded that course for the client late last week.

I’m happy to extend that same service to any verified client in the same situation.

Here’s what else I’ve learned in the last little while: some clients (not that one) don’t charge their end client for the rework time caused by the AI. This contributes directly to the myth, and it IS a myth, that for complex, longer content, an AI voice is “…just as good, if not better”, and “…more efficient”.

Send any AI into an English narration with a word that can be pronounced more than one way, like “construct,” and get set to spend a few hours by the light of your monitor fixing, fixing, fixing, forgetting one instance, and spend a second session, fixing, fixing…

Here are some other unfortunate consequences of the abysmal business practice of not assigning a value to the rework time of their teams in something like eLearning:

• Those companies are directly contributing to putting qualified humans out of work,

• Companies signaling to their employees their time isn’t worth anything, causing a slide in employee morale,

and contributing to poor learner outcomes, including lower retention.

There is tangible value in human skill, knowledge, empathy, emotion, and experience. It’s evident in any narration read by a professional voice actor vs AI.

Keep your learning human when it’s the right choice. Contribute to better outcomes for your company, employees, and the public that might depend on their learning.

I invite you to hear my human voice and I’m happy to help with any instances like the one described above.