By Chris Tester - British Male Voiceover Artist
You might have heard some of these:
✅. People buy from people
✅. Get your audience to know, like and trust you
✅. Talk TO, not AT
As a voiceactor, the direction is to be CONVERSATIONAL as a result. And that's totally fine - but it's not the same as being realistic.
In real speech, we umm, we err, we suspend thoughts and find words. These can be subtly incorporated into a script to humanise it, but conversational speech still hits keywords and has a forward momentum to it more often than not.
I love this speech from Midnight Mass - if you have Netflix, watch it. Throughout this recording I'm using one of my most straight forward humanisation techniques - looking away from the page. This is the closest I as a voice actor get to memorising the lines for a voice job - not looking at the words when speaking makes the read inherently less 'ready', and thus more grounded and realistic as a result.
Let me know if you agree!