Building a Marketplace For Voices

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As odd as it sounds coming from a radio show, voice-overs are on the rise. And it’s not just podcasts — consider e-learning platforms and smart devices. Miles Chicoine, the founding managing director of Voquent, wants his company to be in the middle, helping connect clients with voice actors around the world. According to Chicoine, his platform has over 14,000 voices. Speaking to our partners at the BBC, Chicoine chimes in on the voice-over economy.

My name is Miles Chicoine. I am the founding managing director of Voquent, which is an online marketplace for voices and voice agencies and production companies.

We created the company because, looking at voice-over work from the outside and originally trying to commission a piece of work, I realized that it wasn’t quite as straightforward as I wanted it to be. And I happen to have a friend — he suggested that perhaps a business should be started that actually enables companies who are looking for voices to find everything in one place quickly and easily. The globalization of the internet and the availability of technology for studios at home has really made it possible for a lot more people to get into the voice-acting industry. And that’s made a huge amount of different types of accents and types of voices much more accessible to everyone across the across the planet.

So when we launched, we had no voices on the site. We had no clients, we had nothing. Now we work with coming up to about 200 clients. And we’ve got, you know, about 14,000 or so voices on the site. We get requests for accents that we don’t yet have all the time. Somebody could call up and say, I need a teenage voice from, you know, some obscure part of the world that nobody does voice-over work in really, and then the hunt is on. And that’s just a matter of time. We just need to keep building our site, and our system, and the capability to pick up all those accents. And you know, it’s populating itself because we’re getting hundreds and hundreds of demos every single day.