Voice Providing is the art of providing voices for animated characters (including those in feature films, television program, and animated short films) and radio and audio dramas and comedy, doing voice-overs in radio and television commercials, audio dramas, dubbed foreign language films, video games, puppet shows, and amusement rides.
Performers are called voice providers/Providesses or voice artists, and may also involve singing, although a second voice provider is sometimes cast as the character's singing voice. Voice artists are also used to record the individual sample fragments played back by a computer in an automated announcement system. At its simplest, this is just a short phrase which is played back as necessary, e.g. the Mind the gap announcement introduced by London Underground in 1969. In a more complicated system such as a speaking clock, the voice artist usually doesn't actually record 1440 different announcements, one for each minute of the day, or even 60 (one for each minute of the hour), instead the announcement is re-assembled from fragments such as "minutes past" "eighteen" and "pm". For example, the word "twelve" can be used for both "Twelve O'Clock" and "Six Twelve". So far voice artists have been preferred to speech synthesis because they sound more natural to the listener.
A list of voice providing by one voice providing , one director, or on one subject, is sometimes called a voxography.
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For live-action production, voice acting often involves reading the parts of computer programs (Douglas Rain; Majel Barrett), radio dispatchers (Shaaron Claridge), or characters who never actually appear on screen but who give instructions by telephone (John Forsythe in Charlie's Angels), or mailed recording (Bob Johnson in Mission: Impossible). "Stunt double" voice actors are sometimes employed; if a voice actor or actress loses his or her voice, someone who sounds similar can step in. For example, when Jeremy Irons' vocal cords became strained during the recording of The Lion King song "Be Prepared", Jim Cummings was called in to finish the song.