VoiceBunny Launches “CrowdVoicing” Service, Aims To Be The Amazon Mechanical Turk of Voiceovers

VoiceBunny, a startup coming out of beta today, aims to make it easier and cheaper to get a professional-quality voiceover.

Co-founder and CEO Alexander Torrenegra says that using the traditional process, recording a 60-second voiceover would take four weeks and thousands of dollars, largely because you need to recruit the talent through casting directors and talent agencies. Things are improving (in fact, Torrenegra previously launched another service called Voice123 to bring voiceover auditions online), but Torrenegra says that in many cases, the whole idea of auditioning multiple artists is an unnecessary inefficiency.

VoiceBunny, on the other hand, wants to become the platform for “crowdvoicing” (namely, crowdsourcing to recruit voice talent) the way that Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is the platform for crowdsourcing. Customers can upload the voice script, identify what they’re looking for in the voice, and include any related media, then the service will deliver a voiceover. Under the hood, Torrenegra says VoiceBunny is looking at a number of objective and subjective factors to find the right talent. (Objective factors are things like age, gender, and accent.) All of the audio is screened for quality by the VoiceBunny team, and the voiceover talent’s rating is affected by their ability to choose jobs that they’re actually appropriate for. As part of today’s launch, VoiceBunny is also introducing a 100 percent moneyback guarantee for buyers who aren’t satisfied with a voiceover.

Also starting today, VoiceBunny is switching to a fixed pricing model, with discounts for high-volume projects. A small, one-time project would cost 50 cents per word, while for large, recurring projects the price can go as low as 3 cents per word. The company claims that on average, it only takes 6.58 minutes for it to find a voiceover artist and for the artist to accept, and that the average time to complete a project is 41.6 minutes.

Existing partners and customers include Pixar, Electronic Arts, Rosetta Stone, and Audible.com. Torrenegra emphasizes that VoiceBunny voiceovers should be applicable to a broad range of use cases, particularly since they’re faster and cheaper than normal. For example, he says voiceovers could be used in radio, corporate videos, toys, online videos, podcasting (as an experiment, VoiceBunny created an automatic podcast of venture capitalist Fred Wilson’s blog posts), video games, mobile apps, and more.

VoiceBunny’s co-founder and Chief Talent Officer Tania Zapata (Torrenaga’s wife) does voiceover work herself, so Torrenegra says, “We don’t want to screw the artist,” and that they’re trying to open up new opportunities. He argues that voiceover artists can work much more efficiently on VoiceBunny, because they don’t have to worry about struggling to find jobs, auditioning for those jobs, and invoicing clients. He also notes that even if a client rejects their work, the voiceover artist still gets paid.

The company’s services are available through the VoiceBunny and its API. VoiceBunny was incubated at Torrenegra and Zapata’s firm Torrenegra Labs.