Snippets

Try and think in terms of reusable prompts or snippets. Don’t record prompts like this:

Welcome to our news desk! For sports, press 1. For weather, press 2. For traffic, press 3. And for help, press 0.

This should be broken up into seperate prompts:

Now you can be more flexible. If the customer decides that they want to rearrange the order in which the prompts are played then you can easily put them together in a new way - without having to re-record everything!

To really be on the safe side, it’s advisable to record each item in two positions in the list - as a normal item and as the last item:

Now it may be decided to drop the help prompt altogther and to put traffic first, followed by weather, followed by sports. No problem:

Welcome to our news desk! For traffic, press 1. For weather, press 2. And for sports, press 3.

Obviously this idea of snippets is particularly useful when it comes to recording dates, times and quantities. However, if you really want it to sound good, then you have to remember one more thing: pitch! What’s that I hear you ask - well it’s whether the voice is rising or falling and it’s covered in the next section.

Open & closed snippets

How a word is stressed depends on where it comes in a sentence. If a word is at the end of a sentence then it is normally closed - i.e. the pitch or tone of the speaker’s voice drops at the end of the word to indicate that the sentence is finished. Unless of course it’s a question, in which case the speaker’s tone actually rises. If a word is in the middle of a sentence then the pitch depends on what the following word is. Words at the start of a sentence also have a different intonation.

So when you’re recording your snippets, you have to ask yourself where they come in a sentence. In the tables above you will notice that many prompts have ‘...’ before or after them. This is to indicate that the sentence isn’t over and that the intonation should reflect that accordingly.

One way of assuring this, is to get the voice actor to say the whole sentence and have the sound engineer cut in into snippets. However, if you’re voice actor is good enough, there shouldn’t be any need to do this, as they should know how to make the snippet sound open or closed.

If you have any comments, ideas, issues, etc. about this topic why not try the voice-push forums