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Writing a movie? Need a mechanical-sounding voice for your robot? Voice actors are so ''difficult''. What if there was something easier?
A '''Synthetic Voice Actor''' is a synthetic voice program that voices a character. It's not used a lot, especially when union rules would make that difficult. It's usually used for extremely robotic voices, or a [[Captain Ersatz]] of [[Stephen Hawking]]. It more commonly springs up in [[Abridged Series]] and [[Machinima]], partly to get extra voices, and partly because of [[Rule of Funny]]. When used against human actors, it tends to make the speaker seem inhuman — in more serious works, it's used for threatening robotic characters, usually. Compare the computer voice on the [[Star Trek|''Enterprise'']] (real person) to [[WALL-E|AUTO]] (not a real person).
This trope may not apply to [http://www.cepstral.com/ Cepstral voices], or to programs like Voicestitcher (thevoiceplanet.com is down indefinitely).
Compare [[Machine Monotone]], [[Virtual Celebrity]], [[Auto-Tune]].
{{examples}}
== [[Anime]] ==
* The episode title announcer in ''[[Serial Experiments Lain]]'' was a [[Apple Macintosh|Macintosh]] program named PlainTalk (often falsely called "Whisperer" because of its "Whisper" voice mode).
== [[Film]] ==
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== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* The Cylons in
* ''[[Doctor Who]]'': [[The BBC]] originally considered doing this for the Daleks, but with 1963 technology, they could have done only 45 seconds of dialogue this way, so they used a human voices filtered through a ring modulator.
** It's actually pretty easy to duplicate the Dalek voices. Record your voice with Dalek speech-patterns, over-amplify it to add clipping distortions(sometimes people, including the producers back in the day, often tend to forget this, oddly enough), then run the results through a ring modulator plugin using
** The BBC did the first Cyberman voices by actually building a mockup of the human vocal system, running a stream of air through it, and adjusting it to produce the sounds that made up the speech for the Cybermen. Later versions simply had an actor's voice run through a ring modulator with a different setting to what was used for the Daleks.
** The Daleks, also, do not have mechanical voices, only voices that ''sound'' mechanical. A truly mechanical voice would probably be one-note-just-like-this, but Daleks have a cadence to their voices, and they also go "EX-TER-MI-NATE! EX-TER-MI-''NAAAAATE!''" with each intonation rising in pitch and volume. They look like tin cans, but they have some powerful emotion inside them.
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** If you listen closely, the main character talks exactly how it is written.
* The voice of Byte from ''[[Tron 2.0]]'' is actually a voice of MacinTALK.
* ''Impossible Mission'' on the Commodore 64: "Another visitor? Stay awhile. [[
* Microsoft Sam and Mary appear chanting the name and motto of the Wii party game, ''[[Lets Tap|Let's Tap]]'' in the game's theme tune. [[Ear Worm|Yes, really.]]
* The Intellivision's Intellivoice module.
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* The Hymn of None in ''[[LG15: the resistance|LG 15 The Resistance]]''.
* Garry {{spoiler|aka Gamma}}, the AI/computer from ''[[Red vs. Blue]]''.
* Since [[Doug Walker]] was traumatized into muteness by the terrible, terrible movie,<ref>[[Written
* Pollo of ''[[Atop the Fourth Wall]]''
* That's the primary trait of [http://www.youtube.com/user/IGSRJ IGSRJ's], courtesy of Loquendo.
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* The titular robot in ''[[Whatever Happened to... Robot Jones?]]'' originally used MacinTalk Junior, credited as "Himself", but later switched to a synthesized human voice, and they even redubbed the earlier episodes with the real actor.
* Compuhorse from ''[[Spliced]]''
* Post-''[[
* [[Frank Welker]] used one to voice Soundwave from ''[[Transformers]]'', which is basically his [[Inspector Gadget|Dr. Claw]] voice as heard in one episode where they forgot to use it.
** On the other hand, ''[[Transformers Animated|Animated]]'' Perceptor's voice is completely synthetic, and probably so to bring to mind Professor Stephen Hawking. One of the writers has suggested that he "deleted his emotions and personality" to make room for more data, though (like many an "emotionless" character), [[Tin Man|he certainly seems to have both]], if understated.
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Voice Acting Tropes]]
[[Category:
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