Robot Narrator

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Brent, the course creator, fully recognizes he sounds like a robot imitating a robot on most of the videos. The issue stems from Brent’s wish for every second of the course to be the best it could be. So, rather than create general outlines and quasi-improvise the lessons in a human-sounding manner, he wrote all the scripts and agonized over every word. 

With scripts in hand, and recording software on, Brent quickly confronted the dark truth about his narration skills. His robotic narration was further exacerbated by the intentional omission of all contractions (e.g.,  can’t and didn’t) in the first 200 or so scripts.

Eliminating contractions was a half-baked idea to make the course more accessible to non-native English speakers, because, apparently, contractions are crazy hard to comprehend, (even when a robot says them). 

As you can imagine, the recording sessions were unpleasant, and not so different from the Winnebago Man (profanity warning) but, at the end of the day, Brent stands by his content, just not the delivery. 

The silver lining is that Brent’s voice is almost humanlike when you set the playback speed to 1.25x or faster.