The power of the human voice…how to use it best?

Your unique voice is a part of who you are, and expresses your emotion in way that text or computerized speech cannot. The audio clip in the “Stories” section, from a speech created on SentenceShaper and delivered to over 1,000 people, provides a powerful example of this. Your voice is also a kind of signature that tells people that it is really you that they are hearing.

Live or prerecorded?

If you have exported your SentenceShaper message to a mobile device, there are two basic ways that you can “deliver” it.  One way is to play it back to the listener. We’ll call this “direct playback”. (If you post your speech in a video, or send it as an email, or have it played to an audience — as in the speech mentioned above — then you are using direct playback.)

The other way is to use your recording as a kind of teleprompter, helping you to say the message in real time. We’ll call this “self-cueing”. You practice the message thoroughly ahead of time, and then you use the stored sound files to cue yourself while you try to say the message right then and there. You can listen to your stored sound files as needed, and also look at any text you have added to the page.

What’s the difference? In either case, the message will be in your own voice, but in one case it will be prerecorded and in the other case it will be “live”.

There are pros and cons to both methods. It is more natural in face-to-face conversations to speak rather than playing a recording for the other person. BUT … the effort of saying the message “live” may be so intense that it can make your speech unnatural. You may be concentrating so hard that you won’t make eye contact with the other person, and may find yourself speaking in a kind of robotic style. It’s a matter of personal choice, and you can try it both ways.