Voice acting

Voice acting is the art of providing voices for animated characters (including those in feature films, television programs, animated short films, and video games) and radio and audio dramas and comedy, as well as doing voice-overs in radio and television commercials, audio dramas, dubbed foreign language films, video games, puppet shows, and amusement rides.

Performers are called voice actors/actresses, voice artists or simply voice talent, and their roles may also involve singing, although a second voice actor is sometimes cast as the character's singing voice. Voice artists are also used to record the individual sample fragments played back by a computer in an automated announcement. At its simplest, this is just a short phrase which is played back as necessary, e.g. the Mind the gap announcement introduced by London Underground in 1969. In a more complicated system such as a speaking clock, the voice artist usually doesn't actually record 1440 different announcements, one for each minute of the day, or even 60 (one for each minute of the hour), instead the announcement is re-assembled from fragments such as "minutes past" "eighteen" and "pm." For example, the word "twelve" can be used for both "Twelve O'Clock" and "Six Twelve." For some automated applications, such as London Underground's Mind the gap announcement, the sound of a voice artist may be preferred over synthesized voices because the human voices sound more natural to the listener.