Interested to see how this evolves, @DannyRyan. I think this would make a great roundtable discussion. Should I queue it up? See if I can get a couple of tech guys on the session.

@DannyRyan Greetings.  For what reason are you using TTS?  I ask because we did try it.  We had content developers that speak English as a second language and they did not want their voice on video.  We ditched the whole project and went GIFs w text.

  Our users told us that video is too much time commitment and they will not stay on a page long enough to listen to speech.  However, it is nice for ADA compliance, we still ended up with no speech and more GIFs than video even.  Your thoughts or questions?  Maybe I am also missing something in your story.  Thanks.

Hi @czimmerman 
We too have a team of content author for whom English is a second language. We have similar reasons, the team are not keen on having their voice in audio recordings. 

We are looking into video at the moment, and everything is concerned about the time commitments involved for 5-10 minutes of video at the end.

I never consider Animated GIFs as an option, I am very interested to hear how you are getting on with GIFs? You have got me thinking now about GIF vs Video production resources and costs

Cheers

Curious, does anyone currently use a text to speech / voice option for their audio file creation? We are currently looking into a third-party to do so. We believe this would be the best option for our team and learners - having one consistent voice throughout all of our courses. We are also thinking it would save us time on getting our audio created and not having to have one individual manage all, with inevitably multiple attempts and takes. 

@chetler-findlay We just implemented this within Articulate Storyline in a single BETA course.  It has a built in option for text to speech that is not too bad.  And you are correct, time to edit/replace we expect will improve significantly since we previously used video with a live human narrator.  There are lots of good third party options but they are one trick ponies significantly less expensive than purchasing a complete course authoring tool.  Updating an entire video took some time.  An authoring tool is great but there are more reasons that we invested.  Phil has two great websites that he can share in Office Hours because another benefit is the ability to reproduce a course in multiple languages with also the same voice.  Hope this helps!