Starfish Technologies has announced the forthcoming V9 release of its Advantage AD workstation, adding support for voice synthesis services and giving Audio Description creators another option for producing the finished narration track.
Advantage allows an Audio Description project to be scripted and prepared within the workstation before the narration is added. With V9, users will be able to continue with traditional human voice recording or use third-party voice synthesis applications to automatically generate the AD voice track from the completed script.
The addition follows significant improvements in the quality of synthetic speech. Starfish first demonstrated voice synthesis with Advantage several years ago, but deliberately chose not to incorporate the capability into a commercial release at that stage.
“We made a strategic decision some time ago not to add new features simply because we could,” said Peter Blatchford, CMO at Starfish Technologies. “We showed voice synthesis running with Advantage several years ago, but the feedback at the time was very clear. The quality was not at a level that listeners would find acceptable.
“Voice synthesis has improved significantly since then, and we now believe there are applications where it can be used effectively in the creation of Audio Description. The important thing for us is that it adds a useful option for Advantage users, rather than technology for technology’s sake.”
For the V9 release, Starfish has implemented APIs for Windows SAPI v5.3 and ElevenLabs (https://elevenlabs.io/), allowing synthetic speech to be generated directly from an Advantage AD script using compatible third-party services.
The new functionality does not change the established workflow for projects using professional voice artists. Instead, it extends Advantage to support either approach, allowing the most appropriate method to be selected for each Audio Description project.
Starfish has been involved in Audio Description technology since its introduction into television broadcasting in the early 2000s and continues to develop Advantage around the changing requirements of professional AD production.
Further information is available at www.starfish.tv.
