‘I’m the Voice People Love to Hate’
There’s nothing we, collectively as a species, hate more than Mondays, long Zoom meetings that could have been an email, and those automated voices on customer service helplines.
“Thank you for calling,” the infuriatingly perky voices usually tell us in our moments of utmost desperation. “We appreciate your patience. All our customer care representatives are busy at the moment. Your current hold time is…”
And then, as you sit on hold, that voice comes back, asking for your patience again as the hold time extends to a few more minutes.
But while you were seething at that chirpy voice and stewing in your dark thoughts, waiting for the real customer care representative to show up, have you ever thought that maybe, just maybe, that voice is an actual person too?
For Tanya Nambiar, a New Delhi-based musician and voiceover artist, that question is not just self-validating but also puts a spotlight on the invisible faces behind some of the most iconic – even if annoying – voiceovers in India.
“You can’t see this person, but their voice is telling you something, asking you to subscribe to something or to have a little patience and hold on,” Nambiar told VICE over a phone call from her home in Delhi. “I’ve always been fascinated with the person behind the voice, and that’s how I got into this industry.”
Last week, Nambiar posted a video of her doing the customer care voice on her Instagram, with glee on her face – a sentiment few on the opposite side of the phone would share, we imagine. “The voiceover industry is one you don’t put a face to. There are radio jockeys, who are visible now and have personalities. But not voiceover artists,” the 34-year-old said.
In India, very few voiceover artists have found their spotlight. There’s Shammi Narang, the artist who voiced the announcements at the Delhi Metro rail services, which connects India’s national capital region of 24 million people. Then there’s Jasleen Bhalla, who famously voiced the Indian government-mandated COVID-19 announcement that played every time you’d call someone at the height of the pandemic.
Nambiar herself is a multifaceted artist. She is a singer and songwriter. Her singing voice is distinctly languid yet bold – a stark difference from the different avatars she dons for her voiceover projects. She also runs a sauce company with her husband, puts up badass jump rope videos on her Insta, and is currently expecting a baby.
Apart from the customer care calls, you’ll often catch Nambiar’s voice when you least expect it. Hers is the voice that occasionally pops up in music apps such as Spotify and Wynk, rudely interrupting your listening sesh if you haven’t availed of their premium services. Or they’ll sweet-talk you into subscribing to home service or food delivery apps, when all you want is to watch your favourite YouTube video.
Then there are projects such as Asian Paints’ ad for their Nilaya wallpaper collection, where Nambiar’s voice glides over the nostalgic and wistful designs of cult Indian designer Sabyasachi. Or an informative video on India’s anaemia problem for a non-governmental organisation. She’s also done voiceover for a health-based app called BunkerFit, for yoga and Tabata workouts along with sleep and meditation voices.
Needless to say, Nambiar’s range – of her voice and the nature of her voiceover projects – is wide, each one refreshingly different from the other. Nambiar is familiar with the sentiment of annoyance or despair associated with customer care calls or voices in pop-up ads. But she loves to laugh with the world too. “While most of the world wants to go ad-free and not get annoyed by customer care calls, I look forward to them because that’s where I make my moolah,” she laughed.
Nambiar was born in the northern Indian city of Dehradun at the foothills of the Himalayas. She studied in New Delhi and did her graduation in history from Delhi University. She calls herself a “sales person” who goes for whatever she’s passionate about, and does her best. “In the beginning, I wanted to focus on my singing because I’m very passionate about it. But the entertainment industry is seasonal, and I wanted to do something when I don’t have gigs lined up,” she said. “Ads always fascinated me.”
The voiceover industry in India, she added, is at an interesting phase at the moment. “In a country where most people consider being a doctor and engineer as a stable option, I want to add that being a voiceover artist is a legit career option too,” she said.
With absolutely no professional voiceover training, Nambiar started from scratch, without any insider connections to back her. She has, since, worked her way to a kind of an aural omnipresence, especially during the pandemic, when she recorded all of her voiceovers from her home studio, which she set up four years ago.
Her interest also came from her own experience with customer service caller tunes of government services such as Delhi’s water or electricity departments. “These voices are so painful to hear, and they make you even more irate,” she said, imitating the slow, nasal caller tune voices asking customers to wait – often frosty, listless and unaffected.
“This was years ago, and it used to irk me that most companies were not focusing on getting a good voice with the right tonality and expression,” said Nambiar.
Nambiar said she adds a bit of her own personality to the projects she gets. “The clients give you a brief but they don’t usually know what they want. So there’s a lot of space for voiceover artists like me to offer more. And I always offer more,” she said, adding that she derives a lot of her ideas from observing her surroundings and listening to how people talk. “I often emulate – but not copy – what I hear around me, the way people speak. The key is to just observe a lot.”
There’s a common misconception that you need a good voice to become a voiceover artist, said Nambiar. “This isn’t the case all the time,” she said. “There are many people with great voices but they can’t emote. You need to act through your voice, and emote a message because people can’t see your face.” A common drill for Nambiar is to practise the same line in different voices, just to test the range of the script.
Interestingly, as opposed to a common perception proven even by science – that humans cringe at the sound of their own voice – Nambiar is not put off by hers at all. The artist, whose vocal talents have been described by Rolling Stone India as “clever and dynamic,” said that in fact, she was happily surprised by her own voice when she tried it out for the first time. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is what I sound like!’” she said. “Also, when you do a voice for an ad, it sounds very different from how I’m sounding now. It’s important to understand the voice one was born with, and how one can play around with it.”
One of her more challenging projects, she said, was to do the voice for the sleep section of BunkerFit, which she happened to do with her brother, who is also a voiceover artist. “The challenge is to get others to fall asleep with a pleasant, soothing voice, but that whole thing makes me sleepy too,” she laughed. “There’s always so much to learn from the different voices, be it for a sleep app, or an NGO video, or an ad for a bank.”
Nambiar said the only downside to her job is her husband getting sick of all the ads she records even before they’re live. “But I get paid to talk. It’s bread and butter for me. And I thoroughly enjoy it.”
Despite her sheer diversity, Nambiar said she’s yet to have an iconic moment with voiceover work, counting the voices for Google Maps or Alexa among them. But none of this is just work. “When you love something you do, it doesn’t feel like a task,” she said. “I was always curious about a good voice. That curiosity has got me here. And if work doesn’t come to me, I always figure out ways to get it.”
Published by: Vice News
Reporter: Pallavi Pundir