Vox Daily The Official Voices.com Blog

iPod Shuffle That Speaks To You

By Stephanie Ciccarelli

March 11, 2009

Comments (8)

iPod Shuffle with voiceover Apple has just announced the release of their newest version of the iPod Shuffle.

What makes this unique and why may it matter to you?

The iPod Shuffle is nearly half the size of its predecessor, holds 1,000 songs, and most notably, is programmed to announce song titles, artists names and playlists.

Where Will the iPod Go Next?

Now in its 3rd generation, the iPod Shuffle has evolved to include voiceover, able to speak 14 languages including English, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

The iPod Shuffle press release, published today (March 11, 2009) quoted an Apple official proposing the following in a pitch to sell the product:

"Imagine your music player talking to you, telling you your song titles, artists and playlist names," said Greg Joswiak, Apple's vice president of iPod and iPhoneâ„¢ Product Marketing. "The amazingly small new iPod shuffle takes a revolutionary approach to how you listen to your music by talking to you, also making it the first iPod shuffle with playlists."

Pretty neat, isn't it?

That's a lot of VO

Why add voiceover?

Apple must have done their research and deduced that this was a feature people wanted or would find useful, presumably making it easy for the iPod Shuffle owner to decide whether or not they wanted to employ the voiceover option.

What's not clear, however, is who the voice talent were that recorded the voiceovers or the gender(s) of the voice over artist(s) in each language.

I'm certain whoever did this work must have signed a non-disclosure agreement as that is the way these things generally go with companies the likes of Apple, regardless, it would be interesting to find out who the voice talent are that participated in this massive project.

Any Comments?

What do you think? Could you shed more light on this for us?

If so, leave a comment!

Best wishes,

Stephanie

Comments

It would great if Apple gave us the option to choose between male or female announcers, and perhaps even character voices. It sure would make listening more entertaining.

Posted by:

Stephanie, According to Jesus Diaz in HOW THE IPOD SHUFFLE VOICE OVER WORKS:

Text-to-speech capabilities of your computer are used to generate sound bites, embedding the name of the artist and the song in every tune.This explains why the voices are, different depending on the platform you sync.

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2009/03/how_the_ipod_shuffle_voiceover_works-2.html

Best,

Elaine

Posted by:

Elaine Victoria Grey
March 12, 2009 9:22 AM

Stephanie,

I'd love to be the 'voice' of the iPod... if not just to say the words:

"Chumbawumba....Tubthumping"

LOL

Have a great day!
JC

Posted by:

JC Haze
March 12, 2009 9:35 AM

It looks interesting.

Pros: small, light, good battery and capacity, talking menus

Cons: gotta use their headphones, easy to lose, no screen, etc.

With Apple taking the term "VoiceOver", I wonder how badly that will affect our SEO rankings?

My 2 cents,
Joe

Posted by:

Joe J Thomas
March 12, 2009 9:46 AM

What a cool gig. I'll have a piece of that action.

On the other hand, users may get tired of hearing a voice in their head and may just want their music. Wonder if there's a feature to turn the voice off?

cheers and blessings to all!

:D
Stefania

hope this doesn't throw our SEO rankings off as Joe has mentioned.

Posted by:

That's pretty cool. Thanks for telling us!

Posted by:

Julie Williams
March 12, 2009 11:08 AM

i have questions generated by a few posted comments:
1) Unless I misunderstood Jesus Diaz: These voices are computer generated?
2)Could someone enlighten me as to what an SEO rating is?
Thanks!

Posted by: