VEGAS Creative Software gives video makers natural-sounding voiceover using Azure Cognitive Services

Intuitive tools for audio and video

Good video production results in viewers so engrossed by the finished product that they don’t consciously think about quality. But video content creators and editors do. They work hard to accommodate cost and time pressures without sacrificing quality. Using powerful, reliable video production software helps them create that immersive experience. VEGAS Creative Software added Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services to its software to give its customers fast, effective, affordable voice options for enriching their videos.

Germany-based MAGIX has provided leading video and audio software solutions for customers around the world for 25 years. A wide range of customers use MAGIX solutions that span professional and consumer markets. The MAGIX brand VEGAS Creative Software stands for mid-market video editing solutions targeting documentary filmmakers, YouTubers, and others whose technical needs fall between editing a casual home movie and creating a Hollywood film. These customers typically profit off their videos but operate with a modest budget—some might even be shooting on an iPhone or GoPro. VEGAS Pro offers commercial-grade software with professional-level video and sound editing.

“Traditionally, video editing is very involved and expensive, and it requires a lot of dedication to learn a product,” says Sumit Rai, Chief Product Officer at VEGAS Creative Software. “It’s important to us that VEGAS Pro is intuitive to learn and use. Customers immediately gain access to all the filters, transitions, and other features they need to work quickly and make their videos look great.”

VEGAS Creative Software recently set out to augment its popular VEGAS Pro solution with advanced voice capabilities not just to stay on the leading edge of video software but also to respond to clear customer needs. Video makers wanted a way to add voiceover to their videos without having to use their own voice, hire a professional voice actor, or settle for a robotic-sounding, AI-generated voice.

Natural-sounding voice capabilities

The subject-matter experts at VEGAS Creative Software looked for a high-quality and cost-effective voice solution—then they saw a demonstration of the text to speech feature at a Microsoft Build conference. That convinced them to adopt Speech, part of Cognitive Services, to gain its neural text to speech capabilities and offer customers realistic-sounding voices generated from text. Through Cognitive Services, video makers can choose from among the feature’s speaking styles to match the mood of the content, giving the voiceover emotional overtones like sad, cheerful, or more neutral. They can also select from more than 270 prebuilt voices, such as a person speaking English with an Indian accent.

“We absolutely had to provide a natural-sounding voice because that’s what video makers need,” says Hagen Hirche, Chief Technology Officer at MAGIX. “We only found this high level of authenticity with Azure Cognitive Services. We were stunned by the demos we saw at Build, and we immediately knew we should add the text to speech feature to VEGAS Pro.”

In addition, VEGAS Creative Software adopted Translator, also part of Cognitive Services, for real-time translation of text to speech in other languages. Video makers type what they want to say and select one of many language options. Then the AI-based service converts the text into realistic speech in the target language. “We just select the ‘Translate’ button, and it’s really impressive how well it translates, for example, to German,” says Rai. “Not only does it generate natural speech, but Azure performs the translation and the voice in German sounds really good.”

Fast to deploy and update

Because Speech and Translator are cloud-based AI services, VEGAS Creative Software incorporated them into VEGAS Pro very quickly. It took only a few scrum sprint cycles to add these capabilities to the latest version of VEGAS Pro (VEGAS Pro 19), released in August 2021. The capabilities are now available to customers as part of their VEGAS Pro and VEGAS Post subscription. “Adding neural text to speech to VEGAS Pro was incredibly easy and took just days from a development perspective,” says Hirche.

VEGAS Creative Software also appreciates that updates to Cognitive Services happen automatically, making it effortless for the brand—and its customers—to continue to take advantage of new features. “Using Azure Cognitive Services is much more streamlined compared to typical update procedures for native client functionality,” says Hirche. “Our voice features automatically inherit updates from Microsoft like quality updates, which is a huge advantage of the cloud.”

Added value to customers

Video makers have reacted swiftly and positively to the new language capabilities in VEGAS Pro. “Our YouTubers especially rave about this addition to the service and really see the value in it,” says Rai. “Some customers started by using the text to speech voice as a placeholder but quickly switched to using it as the actual voiceover for their videos. Another customer uses it in an educational environment, and the ability to easily revoice into other languages has been really helpful for their students.”

VEGAS Creative Software provides this added value while simultaneously saving customers time and money compared to how they would have included voice in their videos in the past. “Hiring a professional voiceover artist in the United States can cost around $1,000 a day,” says Rai. “A license for a VEGAS Pro subscription for one year costs $240. These middle-market video makers don’t tend to have large budgets for each production, and our goal was to make lifelike synthesized speech capabilities accessible to them. With Azure Cognitive Services, we’re opening up opportunities for customers to produce content that they might not otherwise be able to create.”

Increased competitive advantage

By providing sought-after video editing capabilities right in an application that customers love, VEGAS Creative Software has made its happy customers happier and attracted new ones. “We’ve seen a large uptick in subscribers since launching VEGAS Pro 19,” says Rai. “We’ve gained a competitive advantage and have set a very high bar for the other platforms we compete with.”

Concludes Hirche, “We couldn’t find a real alternative to Azure Cognitive Services, and we can’t imagine an alternative from a customer’s perspective. We quickly added innovative new features to VEGAS Pro, with the best results we could have hoped for.”

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