Should You Include Voiceover? Consider Captivate’s Text-to-Speech Voices

If you’re creating a tutorial, presentation or course using Adobe Captivate, the question of whether or not to include voiceover in your program should be considered.

There are pro’s and con’s to including voiceover in your program. Depending on your content, voiceover is helpful to reinforce information to the learner. However, too much content, coupled with animation and voiceover may cause learner overload. Consider adding voiceover to accomplish one or more of the following:

  • To reinforce keypoints to the learner.
  • To compliment interactive commands for the learner to complete. For example “To continue, click here.”
  • To introduce material, summarize material and provide additional information not covered on the screen.
  • To satisfy requirements for closed captioning.

Hiring voiceover talent for your training program can be expensive, but is sometimes necessary. As a temporary or alternate solution, some programs, such as Adobe Captivate, allow you to convert text to speech automatically. This is accomplished through an option called Text-to-Speech, and can be found in Captivate by selecting Speech Management in the Audio pull-down menu. By default, only one voice is available, but you can download more voices if needed.

Click here for instructions on how to download additional voices for text-to-speech in Captivate 5.5.

Click here for more on using Text-to-Speech with Slide Notes in Adobe Captivate.

Click here to learn more about Voiceover Options For E-Learning using Captivate’s Text to Speech

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