Guide to Voice Cues

Use Voice Cues to fine-tune your voice's audio performance.

Voice Cues lets you hand-craft your voiceover to sound exactly how you envision it. Have you ever wanted your voice to read a sentence more slowly, or maybe you wanted your final sentence to read with more power, finality, or "oomph?"

With Voice Cues, you can prompt your voice to do just that. To access Voice Cues, start by selecting Project Model, "Caruso (Beta)."

Available Voice Cues

Studio's "Caruso (Beta)" project model offers the following Voice Cues. Need help finding the cue you're looking for? We're constantly expanding this list, so watch for new additions in Studio.

Verbal Cues

• Loudness: Reads a word, sentence, or phrase louder or quieter based on the slider setting.

• Pace: Reads a word, sentence, or phrase faster or slower, depending on the slider setting.

• Pitch: Reads a word, sentence, or phrase with a higher or lower tone.

Non-verbal Cues

• Pause: Shortens or lengthens an existing pause when applied to a punctuation block in your script.

  The pause cue only allows you to adjust existing pauses within your script. These pauses naturally occur at punctuation marks like commas, periods, and dashes. The Pause cue will let you change the length of those natural pauses. However, if you want to add new pauses, we still recommend manually inserting additional punctuation for best results.

Once you add cues to your script, the selected text will show a colored underline that corresponds to the same colored cue. These underlines will remain unless the cue is removed.

• Loudness: blue
• Pace: yellow
• Pause: magenta
• Pitch: plum

Adding Cues to Your Script

Voice Cues are built into Studio's "New" project model and can be accessed through the Cues tab once you've entered a script.

Here is a quick guide to get you up and running with Voice Cues:

1. In the Cues tab, select the text to apply a Voice Cue by choosing the tokens (the gray boxes).
   You can click each word individually, select by paragraph by hovering over the specified text, or use the following commands to select multiple words at once:
2. 1. Click the first word
   2. Hold the SHIFT key
   3. Click the last word
3. Use your cursor to adjust the sliders for each desired voice cue in the right side rail.
   
4. To remove any verbal or non-verbal cue, click on the section with the cues applied and click the Reset icon.
   
5. To remove all cues from your script, click Clear All Cues above the editor or hover to the right of your script to clear cues by paragraph.
   

Previewing Cues

• Once you add a cue to your script, click the Generate Preview button to hear your cue performance.
• Need to make adjustments? Just edit your cues and generate another preview. 
• Once you've got the right take(s), click Save as clip to add it to your clip list in the Script tab.

Tips and Tricks

Voice Cues perform differently across voices. Each voice has a particular vocal range, so the same loudness cue applied to Tobin may sound different when applied to Ava.

1. Add Voice Cues to different text lengths. Adding a cue to a single word may not be as impactful as adding that same cue to a full sentence. If you struggle to achieve the right outcome with your cue, test different text lengths to see if that changes the performance.

2. Get more dramatic results by combining cues. Here are a few combinations to try:

   1. Add loud + slow cues on a call-to-action to get the attention of the listener

   2. Use quiet + fast cues to shift emphasis

3. When in doubt, tinker. The best part of Voice Cues is the ability to dive in and hone each piece of your script. The more you play, the more you'll learn what works best for you and your voiceovers.

Common Cues Error

If you encounter the error "The text must be stripped of white spaces," it indicates there's an extra space after the last paragraph in your script. To resolve this, remove any spaces after the last paragraph's character (e.g., period or question mark).