If you love hearing yourself talk, Adobe wants to put your voice center stage with a new video app.
Adobe Voice is a free app for iPad that produces short videos based on voice recordings, motion graphics and images. It’s based on the idea that speaking is key in storytelling or getting a message across.
Voice is designed to be a social media vehicle that can be used by anyone from students to business people. It’s billed as being simpler than shooting and editing a video while having more impact than a slide-show presentation.
Targeted at mobile users, the app’s animated videos can be viewed on virtually any mobile device.
The human voice is a key part of storytelling due to its ability to convey emotion, according to the app’s design philosophy. Users are encouraged to tell a story by recording one line at a time.
That means hitting a virtual button on the iPad, speaking a sentence, choosing an image or icon for that sentence and then repeating the process.
Users are presented with a “wheel” of ideas on how to structure a narrative. They also get a selection of music and over 25,000 graphics images, as well as the ability to add images from the Web or personal photos.
Graphics effects include chalkboard- and watercolor-style themes, real-time motion blur, 3-D and shadows. Credits listing Creative Commons icons and images are automatically added at the end.
When stitched together, the result is a 60- to 90-second video that takes a few minutes to produce thanks to the automated features and coaching, according to Adobe.
“Presentations can be effective—if everyone you care about is in the same room. But it’s really your voice that tells the story,” Adobe Voice senior product manager Tom Nguyen wrote in a Twitter interview.
“That makes a personal connection. So a slide deck can’t help you tell your story to thousands/millions of people online.”
Voice breaks storytelling down into building blocks, so users can experiment with their story one line at a time to see how it plays, he added.
Users of Adobe’s Creative Cloud, the server-based application that hosts popular titles such as Photoshop, can tap into their photos and add them to Voice narratives.
While the software maker charges $29.99 or more per month for Creative Cloud access, it’s offering Voice for free from the Apple App Store.
The app requires iPad 2 or higher and iOS 7, as well as a free Adobe ID to publish videos, which can be shared or embedded in Web pages.