So I checked my email yesterday and found 102 new Call Box announcements for H&M. Again, I have to thank my nearly 20-year client I wrote about recently for this work.

The work isn’t hard, but it has to be done very differently than most VO work.

For example…the announcement you hear is “Customer Assistance to Register 1.” And then you have the same announcement for all 26 registers at the store. That means consistency in the way those words are delivered. The inflections need to be the same – only the register number changes. The intensity and energy need to be the same. And not only the same for that batch of announcements, but for the new ones that come along.

One time I was recording at a client’s facility (before the home studio really became defacto) and they wanted me to record the following: “You have 1 new message – You have 2 new messages – You have 3 new messages – You have 4 new messages” – and so on and so on until “You have more than 50 new messages.”

So I started in and went through all 50+ prompts without stopping or stumbling – leaving a beat between them so that they could be edited. The reaction was priceless – a big pause and then the head tilt – “How did you do that?” look.

For another client, I have been recording the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of doctors, dentists and lawyers for about 15 years – and the recordings I do in 2019 should match the ones I did in 2004.

Also, the file format is different from most regular audio files. We deliver in a much lower quality, but need to know how to make that sound as good as possible. We also need to be able to provide our clients with obscure telephony formats on occasion, so we have to know a little bit about a lot of stuff in order to ask the right questions.

It is good steady work. Not the most stimulating work around, but certainly a challenge to be consistent over so many years.