First thoughts · Requirements · AI and the profession

Anita's website requirements

Anita's first thoughts are in 2026-08-29-1515 Anita's first thoughts on website requirements and are not repeated here. These questions fill the gaps in that account. Each answer stands beneath its question; a question with nothing beneath it is still open.

Purpose and audience

1. Who does Anita expect to hire her? A casting director, a production company, the marketing department of a pharmaceutical or medical device firm, an e-learning producer, an audiobook publisher, or a mixture.

2. How will they reach the site? A search, a link she sends with a pitch, a profile on a voiceover marketplace, or an agent's recommendation.

3. Is she already listed on the voiceover marketplaces, Voices.com, Voice123, Bodalgo, ACX and the rest, and does she intend to be?

4. Does she have an agent, or want one?

5. What should a visitor do before leaving? Play a demo, download an audio file, send an enquiry, or remember her name for later.

6. Has she been paid for voiceover work already, or is this a launch from nothing? Credits change what the site can say about her.

Question 3 decides what the site is for. If the marketplaces bring the work, the site is the place a buyer checks after hearing her elsewhere, and it has to be credible rather than persuasive. If she is selling herself directly, the site has to win the job on its own, and everything below it gets bigger: the demos, the search words, the enquiry form.

Her name and her reach

7. What professional name does she work under, and does she own the domain for it?

8. She wants to be easily searchable. Which words should bring her up? "Medical voiceover artist" and "medical narration" are the obvious candidates, but the phrasing buyers actually type is worth checking with someone who books voices. This carries more weight than it did three years ago: synthetic voices have hollowed out the cheap tiers of the marketplaces, which is where a new name used to be found, so a buyer looking for a human is more likely to arrive by search than by browsing a roster. The evidence is in Whether AI is superseding voiceover artists.

9. Which English accent does she perform in, and which others can she do? Buyers filter by accent before they listen to anything.

10. How far does the Hindi go? Performing in Hindi to broadcast standard is a different offer from speaking it, and the answer decides whether a Hindi demo goes on the site and whether the site itself carries Hindi.

11. She names the South Indian subcontinent. Hindi is the language of the north; work in the south is commissioned in English or in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada or Malayalam. Is she aiming at Indian clients broadly, which English and Hindi between them serve, or at the south in particular?

Demos

12. Which demos exist now, and which does she still have to record? She has named medical work and audiobook reading.

13. Who recorded them, and where? A performance recorded in an untreated room loses work whatever its quality.

14. Does she have a home studio, and what is in it? Buyers ask for the microphone, the interface and the treatment of the room.

15. Can she take a directed session over Source-Connect, Cleanfeed or Zoom, and should the site say so?

16. Should a demo play in the browser only, or download? A downloadable file suits a buyer who wants to show it to a colleague, and it is equally convenient for anyone who wants to reuse her voice without paying for it.

17. Should each demo carry a written transcript? A transcript lets a deaf visitor read what the audio holds, and it gives a search engine words to index where otherwise there are none.

Fees and working practice

18. Does she want her rates on the site, or "rates on request"? Published rates turn away the buyers who cannot afford her and anchor the ones who can; withholding them means answering every enquiry by hand.

19. What is the structure? Audiobook work is usually quoted by the finished hour, advertising by usage, territory and term, corporate narration by the project or the studio hour. Which of these does she want to offer, and at what figures?

20. What does she promise on turnaround, revisions and pickups, and what does she ask for before starting?

21. Does she trade as a sole trader or through a company, and is she registered for VAT? The answer decides whether a published figure carries VAT or not.

The enquiry route

22. Anita asks for "a direct folder into which the information could go". Read as a form on the site that asks an enquirer what the job is, with the answers arriving in her inbox and kept in one place. Is that the right reading, and what does she need to know before she can quote? The likely fields are the script or its length, the medium, the usage and territory, the deadline and the budget.

23. Should the form accept an attached script? A form that takes a file is a different build from one that takes text, and it carries the rest of the decision with it: which file types, what size limit, where the files sit, how long they are kept, and what happens to a script marked confidential.

24. How much does she want in public? An email address and a form are one thing; a telephone number, a postal address, or anything that locates her home studio is another.

Data and obligations

25. Where do the enquiries and any attached scripts go, who reads them, and how long are they kept?

26. Does she need to register with the Information Commissioner's Office? Holding enquirers' names, addresses and scripts is processing personal data, and sole traders are not exempt as a class. Alec should work through the ICO's own self-assessment rather than assume it either way.

27. Does the site need a privacy notice, terms, and a cookie notice? A site with a form and no tracking needs less than one that measures its visitors, so this depends on whether she wants to know how many people arrive and from where.

AI and her voice

These three come out of the research in Whether AI is superseding voiceover artists, which found that buyers of regulated work increasingly ask where a voice came from, and that a British performer has no statutory right in her own voice to fall back on.

28. Does the site state a policy on AI and voice cloning, and what does it say? In the Censuswide survey of 700 business leaders and consumers for Voices.com, 79 per cent of those deciding on voice AI said it matters that a voice comes from real, attributed talent. Saying plainly that she performs every recording herself sells to those buyers, and it sets her terms before a client proposes their own.

29. Will she license a synthetic copy of her voice at all, and on what terms? The decision belongs before launch rather than after the first offer, because audio already generated from a model cannot be recalled. If the answer is no, the site should say so. If it is yes, the licence needs named uses, a stated term, a right to withdraw future generation, and written exclusions. Until Parliament legislates, her contract is her only protection: no United Kingdom statute gives a person a right in their own voice.

30. How should the demos be served, given that public audio is training material? Reporting of the August 2026 campaign for a statutory voice right put at three seconds the sample needed to clone a voice. This is an argument about how the demos reach a listener, not against having them. It bears on question 16, whether a file downloads or plays in the browser only, and on whether the site carries a notice reserving her recordings against text and data mining.

Look and tone

31. What should the site sound like? Medical advertising and audiobook narration pull in opposite directions, one clinical and precise, the other warm.

32. Does she have a photograph she is content to publish, and does she want one on the site at all?

33. Are there voiceover sites she likes, and what does she like about them?

34. Does she have colours, typefaces or a logo already, or does the site start from nothing?

Practicalities

35. Is there a date it has to be ready by, and what drives that date?

36. Who owns the domain, and who pays for the hosting?

37. Once the site is live, who adds a new demo? Whether Anita can do that herself decides how the site is built.

38. Which email address should the enquiries reach?