So, I’m thinking that by now everyone has gotten the E-Mail regarding Replica Studios shutting down at the end of June. That sucks. But now what’s the best alternative to get quality voice actors?
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If you don’t mind paying for one, I would recommend suggest ElevenLabs. Not only do they have some really good voices with excellent inflection, but the feature I use most often is uploading my own voiceover files, and have it map the voice I choose to the VO file; consequently, I get the exact inflection I want, with the vocal tone that I am looking for as well.
I think the subscription is ~$200 per year, but as much as I use it, it is well worth it to me.
Good luck!
Terry
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I agree with using ElevenLabs. I have the $5/month subscription, which works fine.
Replica started out promising but then went to a very costly subscription model. Also, they couldn’t really compete anymore regarding the quality of their voices.
ElevenLabs is innovating contiuously, so they keep up their offerings. There are various other AI-based options today as well.
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You get better results casting actors. Try voice acting club or casting call club.
You get better results casting actors. Try voice acting club or casting call club.
What if you are only doing personal projects for a NON monetized youtube channel with no budget or expectation of earning money?
and what if I need foreign languages like Arabic?
Should we hire voice actors AND studio musicians for original theme songs as some act of charity? 
You can do unpaid casting calls and there’s nothing wrong with that as long as you’re transparent about it not making money. It might not attract the professionals but from my years of experience from it, I’ve had great luck getting quality talent.
Some of us are not comfortable with asking strangers for FREE labor with demands like must know fluent Arabic or Russian etc
and I certainly would not ask studio musicians to compose a FREE them song for some silly cartoon animation that I am putting on youtube for My grandsons
AI generated voices and musics has liberated us solo animators from having to deal with such hassles.
Producing a commercial production with a budget is a different matter of course.
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Let me put it this way. Trust me on this one, I’ve done this for years when I had no budget and was a college student working with machinima and iclone.
It is okay if you want to ask for free casting as long as you are transparent about it being a hobby project. There are voice actors who want to pursue it professionally and this is a great opportunity for them to practice. An original animation like you see in a iclone project is something they can put on their portfolio if they wish to. I’d often see my work on a resume time to time.
Is it always a smooth operation? No. I’ve had some ghosting, but it ends up being a recast and I move on. You will definitely see this as less of an issue if you’re hiring actors. Just something for the original poster to consider.
Send me a message if you need assistance on casting, I can give you some advice.
slightly off topic - but still on topic - i was really impressed with the voice coming from chatgpt in this video - I have not heard it on my free account, but this sounds so real, I’m almost tempted to think it’s a hoax - he has the $200 a month corporate account, so I can’t validate as true or false - but it’s scary real imo.
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I think her name is “Vale”
she is in the free tier of ChatGPT
I user “her” all the time.
I asked her to refute the ‘AI art has no soul”
argument.
Note the the hint of sarcasm in her
rebuttal to the anti AI luddites.
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wow really ? how did you change the voice, i don’t see an option to change the voice on the browser version. I have this valley girl default voice lol - not becoming for my simulation, Gibby. lol
edit - nm, found it, - click on user icon, settings - then speech -
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Let me put it this way. Trust me on this one, I’ve done this for years when I had no budget and was a college student working with machinima and iclone.
Well I am happy you found some eager fellow student to help you back then.
Today I am a 61 year old unmarried male who might
want a young woman, with a lovely welsh accent, to voice a female character who is in love with an “older man”
on an animated personal film project project with no budget.
I can only imagine the response to such a request in todays
social climate
No thanks I am using AI. 
There are voice actors who want to pursue it professionally and this is a great opportunity for them to practice. An original animation like you see in a iclone project is something they can put on their portfolio if they wish to.
Well I am happy that you are able to find
such people who are willing to give you FREE labor for
“Exposure” considering the state of voice acting today as many video game companies are using AI particularly for multilingual
productions.
To each their own
@autodidact - here’s a new toy I’ve been playing with that you might like for making your own royalty free music for your videos - it’s an ai sample generator that works locally on your machine. I was thinking of making sample packs of these that i beef up in my daw / music gear. I also have a few other generative AI plugins for my daw that i purchased for making cinematic drone sounds, really cool AI stuff is crossing over into music for production purposes beyond just “write everything for me” ai lol.
Phil Speiser is making some really great cutting edge AI plugins for music production -
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There is room for both. I use cloned voices (free 11lab account works for me) on my own performances for quick shorts and creepy old naked man videos *(…all voices are by me). The results are acceptable.
On bigger projects I love to use CCC. I agree with Ben that the results are superior. Also, the casting process helps bring characters to life and its fun to have people excited about participating in my projects. When you have to feel like 200 views is a success sometimes getting a few personal congrats or a supportive message from the cast makes things feel good. I’ve paid 20$ for several recent roles and received more than 100 auditions for each. I have nothing but positives to say about the process and results.
Of course there is room for both I voiced an entire 93 minute Marvel fan film faking the Russian ,German, London
and North American “stoner dudes” accents all myself back before AI was a thing.
It was torture. 
But we have this AI tool now and it is viable
so I will use it before begging strangers to provide me Free labor or burn money hiring voice actors for youtube videos that only get 20 or 30 views.
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I’ve recently subscribed to 11Labs and super impressed.
I was actually surprised at how realistic the voices can be with little effort.
I honestly don’t think you could pick most of the characters voices I’ve used from 11Labs as being artificial.
And lots of accents to choose from, which is great for me, because often it’s hard to find a decent selection of Australian accents.
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Everyone has their own way of working and that is fine.
One reason I create animation in my own studio is that I can set my own pace without deadlines. Otherwise, it’s too much like being back in the office where you have to deal with other people and rely on them and occasionally confront them if they do a sh*tty job. I can be a very good team player if necessary and for some work, such as research, it was actually pleasant and fulfilling. But now I’m retired and can do things mostly on my own. I also know my limits, so if I can’t make or do it myself, I buy stuff that I need for my films.
As to voices, some people may know exactly in advance the dialog lines, and in that case you could get voice actors who do their thing. What I have found though is that when I hear the dialog in the scene, I sometimes find that the wording isn’t quite right. So that is already a very useful application of an AI voice, because it is easy to change the dialog.
Another issue is that some films may take a while to complete. AutoDidact has shown that with AI the production of a film can be sped up, but I finished a feature length animation last year that took several years: getting the story right, completing scenes, doing the final editing, etc. In that case, you would have to be able to access your voice talent for a prolonged time, because there may be changes in the dialog. So, using an AI voice has its advantages in that case as well. And if the voices improve, as they do often nowadays, it is easy to replace a voice with the improved one. I went through a few iterations of voices for my feature film.
You can also clone a voice, which opens new possibilities, and you can imprint the performance of one voice on another to improve expressiveness. So, yeah, it’s just another tool in the box, but something that’s worth considering.
NOTE: replace [*] with [i] in “sh*tty”…
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I have an opensource project that uses Microsoft Speech AI. You have to sign up for a free Azure account, but Microsoft gives you 500,000 characters per month free. That’s about 10 - 15 hours of text. I just updated this week and there are now 95 voices. There are 300 or 400 from Azure Speech, but I only use the English ones. You can filter by male or female and country.
I made this after reading this post. This is a Great Britain Voice Hollie, Emotion Angry.
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I will add, that before AI voices became realistic enough, I did use real voice actors from Fiverr. The people I chose often only cost me about $10-20 for a production, and were very accomodating. Also quick turn around.
And I will still continue to use them when I can, as I like to support these people. But ever since AI has improved, the convenience factor of fine tuning vocal delivery and instant availability has been a big attraction. Also I did find most of the voice actors tend to probably do a lot of advertising scripts or story telling, so find they tend to sound a little too ‘refined’ or formal for what I am usually after. Most times I want a fairly casual sounding vocal delivery.
But yeah definitely another option.
No, actually, I received no such e-mail.
While I did play around with Replica Studios a few years ago, I don’t think I ever joined their paid-for tiers. When I checked back into my account, I found most of the examples I created at the time no longer sound very realistic/convincing to me. Maybe they have better voices and/or settings/processing that I’m not aware of, but going by what is available today, I was pretty underwhelmed.