If you are searching for a voiceover, you probably already have a video in mind. A product explainer, a welcome video for new clients, a short piece for LinkedIn. The usual next step is to write a script, find a voice artist and book a recording.
For most New Zealand small businesses and educators, you may not need a voiceover artist at all. Your own voice, recorded on your phone, can be enough. This article covers one option for doing that, why your own voice often works better, and when a professional is still the right call.
An option to consider: a content kit that uses your own voice
A voiceover gets you one video. Most businesses need to keep showing up, with a steady flow of videos and posts that keep them visible and share what their clients need to know. That is where a content kit can help. Instead of paying for each recording, you have a way to make content whenever you have something to say.
The Video Content Kit is one way to do this. You talk into your phone for a few minutes, the way you would explain something to a client. No script and no camera. The kit then:
- Edits what you said. It cuts the ums, restarts and repeats, so the video keeps your words and your way of saying them, without the stumbles.
- Cleans up the sound. It takes out the low rumble phones pick up from traffic, air conditioning or a hand on the phone, evens out a boxy or hollow tone, and sets a steady volume.
- Builds the whole video. Captions, graphics in your brand colours and fonts, and your own photos, footage and music if you have some.
- Gets it ready to post. A cover picture and the post text come with each video. The same memo can also become a carousel or a graphic post.
It suits people who want to make their own content but do not have the time or the technical background to set something like this up. It is NZD $795, paid once, and runs on your own Claude Pro plan, about NZD $40 a month. Whether you use a kit, a voiceover artist or something else, the rest of this article will help you decide.
Why your own voice works better than a hired one
If people buy from you because of you, a stranger's voice works against you. It can sound polished and still feel like an advert. Your own voice is the one your clients hear on the phone, in meetings and at events. Every time they hear it in a video, they get to know you a little more.
This matters even more for educators and trainers. Your students already know how you explain things. A hired voice reading your material loses the way you put it.
A professional voice sounds like a business. Your voice sounds like the person they are going to deal with.
What does a voiceover cost in New Zealand?
As a guide, the New Zealand voiceover rate guide put together by Gravy For The Brain and a working group of New Zealand voice professionals lists web and explainer videos under a minute at $300 to $500, and internal or onboarding videos up to 3 minutes at the same $300 to $500. The guide is labelled 2020 and says artists can charge whatever they choose, so treat those figures as a rough starting point.
The bigger cost comes later. A professional read is recorded once, from a finished script. If you change a price, a date or a product name, that usually means booking the voice again. When the voice is yours, you record the new part yourself, whenever you like.
What a kit cannot fix
The kit improves ordinary phone sound. It cannot rescue a recording that was very poor to begin with. Two things to watch:
- A very echoey room. Hard walls and floors bounce your voice around, and that echo stays in the recording. A lounge with couches, curtains and a rug is a much better place to record than a kitchen, bathroom or empty office.
- A phone that is too far away. Keep the phone close to you, pointed at your mouth, not sitting on the desk across the room. A recording sent through some chat apps can also lose quality on the way, so save the original file from your phone where you can.
Get those right and your recording gives the kit plenty to work with.
When a professional voiceover still makes sense
A trained voice artist is still the right choice when the voice is not meant to be a particular person:
- Phone systems and on-hold messages, where callers expect a neutral voice for years.
- Radio or TV adverts, which have their own broadcast standards.
- A message from the organisation, not a person, that should outlast whoever is in the role now.
- Characters and animation, where the voice is acted, not spoken.
For everyday business videos, though, your own voice does the job better.
Later on: a voice twin or an AI video digital twin
Once you are comfortable with the kit, there are two next steps, and you do not need either to start.
A Voice Twin is a professional AI copy of your own voice. You record once, then type what you want to say and it is spoken in your voice. It suits people who would rather write than talk, or who update the same content often. It is NZD $1,000.
An AI video digital twin is a video version of you, for people who want to be seen as well as heard, without filming every time. Not the engineering kind of digital twin, which simulates a machine or a building. The pricing page sets out all three side by side.
I have also written about why your voice is the easiest place to start with AI content. You can see finished examples on the Examples page.
Wondering whether your own voice will work?Get in touch and ask me