According to a report published by the UN World Tourism Organization, around a billion people had indulged in international travel in the year 2013. 54% of those people traveled for leisure and 60% of these leisure travelers spent their time visiting tourist attractions and monuments.
When it comes to travel, domestic or international, most people are interested in visiting locations that have some kind of historical, religious, technological, or cultural significance.
Now, to get around foreign locations, travelers back in the day used travel guides. Travel guides were books that provided travelers with all kinds of information about the place they were visiting. However, carrying these books was always a problem. After all, no one wants to spend their vacation time flipping book pages and hunting for information.
Also, some travelers would forget to carry these books, when they needed it the most.
The Replacement
Since, book guides are more of a problem than a solution, the best alternative is an audio-guide. Audio-guides are voiceover recordings that orally reproduce information about various foreign locations. They provide details about the location’s history, key points and even, trivia.
With these audio-guides, also referred to as audio tours, all you need to do is download them and upload them onto your smartphone or iPod. Since, these are devices you carry on you all the time, you likely not to forget them. Plus, you don’t have to flip through pages.
You can even get specific audio-guides for art galleries, museums, bus tours, and monuments etc. More importantly, you can get them in your language of preference.
Generally, they are offered in about 9 languages, which include French, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Mandarin, and English.
The Voices
Audio-guides are recorded using a wide range of voices. In fact, some destinations prefer to make use of celebrity voices for the narration. A good example would be the audio-guide for Westminster Abbey, which had British movie star, Jeremy Irons, doing the narration. The preference among some groups for celebrity voiceovers indicates that the audio-guide industry needs voiceover artists who can speak with a voice that is authoritative and yet, pleasant or familiar.
Fortunately, there are enough professional voiceover artists with these capabilities and those producing such audio-guides need not spend every penny they have to hire a celebrity.
The Future
The trend in audio-guide narrations is to do away with lecture style or robotic voice-overs. Instead, creators are looking for a conversational approach, often combining entertainment value with educational content. This approach has been known to engage the listener on a much higher level.
ABOUT ROBERTA –
Roberta is a Professional AND award Winning International Voiceover Actor, as well as an accomplished on-camera actress and spokesperson. She lives in the beautiful San Francisco Bay Area and is the owner of Roberta Kennedy Voice Talent and RK Productions, Inc.
She voices for companies around the world using her state of the art, broadcast quality studio. She’s hired for commercials, web demos and explainer videos, product infomercials, documentaries, promo/imaging, political ads, e-learning videos, podcasts, guided real estate tours, telephony/IVR projects, high profile corporate presentations, video games and character animation.
Her voice is described as: playful, contemporary, compelling, commanding, inviting, sultry and smooth. A hip edge with sophistication, bold, warm, interesting and engaging are also commonly used adjectives to describe her voice.
Her home studio is equipped with ipDTL, ISDN and phone patch capability with lightning fast turnaround times! A voiceover talent with over 20 years of voiceover acting experience, she offers a full range of voiceover services at highly competitive rates & will work with your budget to help you promote your business to new levels of excellence!
To request a personal quote or audition and/or to review more of her credits & demos, feel free to visit her website:www.robertakennedy.com – or mail her atroberta@robertakennedy.com. You can even give her a call on (408) 313-7202.