Ten questions to ask a voice over agency before you book

Choosing a voice over supplier on the strength of a showreel is like choosing a restaurant from its photographs. The reel is a curated best-of, in someone else’s script, directed by someone else, to a brief that was not yours. It tells you the voice exists. It tells you nothing about what happens on your project.

These are the questions we would ask. Several of them are about the weeks after delivery, which is where voice over projects actually go wrong.

1. Whose studio is the session recorded in?

There are three answers and they are genuinely different: the agency’s own room, a studio hired by the hour, or the voice actor’s home setup. All three are legitimate and all three are sold in the same words. The difference shows up in whether you can attend, whether a pickup can be turned around the same day, and whether episode nine sounds like episode one six months later. Ask which it is, then ask whether you can sit in or direct remotely.

2. Who directs, and do they speak the language?

A voice over in a language nobody in the room speaks is not directed; it is recorded and hoped for. This is the question that decides whether a mispronounced product name, a wrong emphasis or a register that reads as sarcastic in the target market gets caught in the session or three weeks later by a customer. Ask specifically: for my language, who is directing and are they a native speaker?

3. Does the quote separate studio time from the buyout?

It should be two lines, not one number. Studio time is the cost of making the recording. The buyout — the usage fee — is the licence to use it, and it is a completely different quantity driven by where the audio runs, on what, and for how long. A single all-in figure is not comparable to anyone else’s, and it hides the line that grows later. Our guide to how voice over pricing works breaks the two apart, and the usage fee calculator prices the second one before you pick up the phone.

4. Exactly what does that buyout cover?

Three things, all in writing: which markets, which media, and for how long. “Online use” is not a licence term — online where, on whose channels, paid or organic, for twelve months or in perpetuity? This is the single most common source of a second invoice nobody expected, and it is entirely avoidable by asking one question before the session rather than after the campaign launches.

5. What happens when the usage changes?

It will. The internal video gets put on the website; the six-month campaign runs for eighteen. Ask now what extending costs and whether the rate is agreed up front or negotiated under pressure later. The answer is cheap to get today and expensive to discover in month seven.

6. Can I hear shortlisted voices on my own script?

A casting on your words, in your context, at your pace is the only real test. Some suppliers charge for it, some do it free, some only offer reels. Ask which, because comparing three demos of other people’s scripts tells you about the actors’ range and nothing about the fit. We record free castings on your own script for exactly this reason.

7. What counts as a free re-record, and what counts as a new session?

Get the line drawn before you book. Usually: a direction the agency missed, an audio fault or a mispronunciation is theirs; a script change or a change of mind about the read is yours. That is a fair split, but it needs to be stated, because the conversation is much harder after the fact with a deadline in the room.

8. How do you keep the same voice across languages and across time?

If the campaign runs in eight markets, someone has to hold the tone together across eight different actors, and that is a casting and direction job rather than a scheduling one. If it is a series, someone has to be able to book the same actor and recreate the same setup in nine months. Ask how casting notes, session settings and actor availability are kept — or whether they are kept at all.

9. What do I actually receive, and who owns it?

Ask for the deliverables list: file format and sample rate, whether you get the edited master only or the raw takes too, whether files are named to your convention, and — for games and eLearning — whether they drop straight into your engine or authoring tool without anyone renaming several thousand files by hand. Then ask who owns the recording and what you are licensed to do with it. Our guide to voice over file formats covers the technical half.

10. Who is my point of contact, and what is the turnaround?

One named project manager or a shared inbox. A stated turnaround or “as soon as we can”. Neither answer is disqualifying on its own, but both tell you what the week of the deadline will feel like, and they are worth knowing before you are in it.

The short version

Four of these ten questions are about money and licensing, and four are about what happens after delivery. That ratio is deliberate: the recording is the easy part, and almost every voice over project that goes wrong goes wrong on usage, re-records, consistency or handover. A supplier who answers all ten plainly has been through each of them. A supplier who answers in adjectives is asking you to find out on your own project.

Ours: our own Central-London studios since 2008, native-speaking direction in the room, studio time and buyout split on every quote from £400 per hour with the licence terms written out, free castings on your own script, and one project manager from brief to final file across 100+ languages. Send us your script and put the ten questions to us first.