GoAnimate Case Study

GoAnimate is a web-based, do-it-yourself video-creation platform. The company’s mission is to enable businesses, schools, and individuals to make custom videos using drag-and-drop tools and a vast multimedia library filled with thousands of characters, backgrounds, props, music tracks, and sound effects. The platform is designed to allow makers of all skill levels to create an animated video quickly and easily. GoAnimate’s primary customers include eLearning and training professionals, HR specialists, and marketers who are looking to create engaging videos. The company also offers its GoAnimate for Schools platform for K-12 educators and their students.

Many videos—in particular animated explainers—rely on a narrator to convey key ideas. A high-quality voiceover can complement visuals and tell a compelling story, while a low-quality voiceover can leave viewers without the complete message. GoAnimate offers a few ways for users to add voice to a video, including direct microphone recording, uploading their own recording, or hiring a professional voiceover artist. However, not all users have access to audio resources, equipment, or budget for these options. An alternative voiceover option offered by GoAnimate is text-to-speech (TTS), which provides a fast and easy alternative for makers. TTS is an especially useful solution for makers who need to produce videos across multiple demographics, who plan to make significant edits to their audio, or who want to drop in audio quickly to judge tone or tempo. To provide the best options for its customers, GoAnimate looked to enhance its TTS offerings and language support for the voiceover feature.

After comparing more than 10 TTS vendors, GoAnimate selected Amazon Polly—an Amazon Web Services (AWS) service that turns text into lifelike speech. GoAnimate primarily valued the natural and lifelike quality of the English-language voices and speech patterns offered by Amazon Polly, and felt that the quality of the non-English voice surpassed other vendor options. Alvin Hung, founder and CEO of GoAnimate, says, "I studied and tested numerous vendors before choosing Amazon Polly. The voices are the most natural ones and the API is also great and easy to implement.”

With dozens of lifelike voices across multiple languages, Amazon Polly provides a range of male and female voices with a variety of accents. Amazon Polly TTS is also integrated with GoAnimate’s pre-animated assets, enabling customers to create animated videos without the cost of professional video production.

After selecting Amazon Polly, the first thing GoAnimate noted was the ease of integrating TTS into its application using the API. Hung explains, “Since Amazon Polly is a SaaS service, we don't need to maintain our own servers to host the TTS application. This change frees us from a lot of overhead—security patches, scalability management, redundancy management, etc. Now with AWS, we don't even need to worry about scalability and security. Those issues are taken care of by Amazon Polly, which saves us immense time and resources.” Since implementation, Amazon Polly has also resulted in cost and time savings. For instance, GoAnimate used to pay $2,000 a month for IVONA, and is now paying $100 per month for Amazon Polly. In terms of resources, the company saves around two man-months every year.

Amazon Polly’s fluid pronunciation of text in multiple languages enables GoAnimate users to create localized content for global users. Compared to the traditional option of procuring voice recordings, users can quickly and easily voice the characters they animate (characters lip-sync with the voiceover) by adding narration to their videos using the TTS feature. This is well-suited for scenarios in which live voiceover is resource- or time-prohibitive, such as when developing video content for multiple languages or using TTS as placeholder during pre-production to speed the approval process.

One of GoAnimate’s customers, Kapitec Software, uses the video-creation platform to develop applications that improve web design, web performance, and eLearning for companies. The ability to add narration and dialogue using GoAnimate’s Amazon Polly-powered voiceover functionality is a key feature for Kapitec. Using Amazon Polly means there is no need to hire voice actors, and it is easier for Kapitec to iterate quickly and make changes on the fly. “GoAnimate is an affordable and effective solution for us, and we can now present products and services in a much more engaging way,” says Sandrine Boarqueiro‐Verdun, CEO of Kapitec Software. “The text-to-speech voices are very natural-sounding. Although we mainly use the French voices, having an extensive language selection provides us with the option to localize content for different regions. Our videos are well-received by our customers and viewed more than other content.”