The Brazilian Portuguese Voice Over Biz with Daniel Azulai Bittencourt

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Hi there, and welcome to Vox Talk, your weekly review from the world of voice over. I'm your host, Stephanie Ciccarelli from Voices. What's the difference between Iberian Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese? Well, you're about to find out. San Francisco-based Brazilian voice artist, coach, and director Daniel Azulai Bittencourt joins me to shed some light on the voice over market for Brazilian Portuguese talent. Welcome to the show, Daniel.

Daniel Azulai Bittencourt:
Thank you, Stephanie. It was a pleasure to be here with you.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:
Oh, absolutely. And I think you had been to one of our events as well in the last few years where we got to meet. So thank you very much for coming.

Daniel Azulai Bittencourt:
Thank you.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:
Yeah, so Daniel, oh my goodness. You have been in the voice over business now for over 25 years, that's quite a while. What kind of changes have you seen in the Brazilian market for voice over?

Daniel Azulai Bittencourt:
In the Brazilian market, I would say there are a lot of changes. I mean, I would say the internet was the biggest one. And I think that the biggest change in the voiceover industry was the internet. Like any voiceover talent that's been for like 10, 15 years in the market has experienced this change. I mean, I remember when I had to go from studio to studio, like crossing the city and have to come back a few hours later to change the script, to change some kind of interpretation. And I mean, I myself started recording home regularly after a political campaign where they tapped the phone of the agency and they hacked the internet. So I found myself recording from home for the first time, like on a daily basis, I couldn't even like send things to email or they had like a guy with a motorcycle picking up like the CD or was crazy. But I think other change, I would say, like in terms of equipment, if you go back to the beginning of 2000s, I mean, to buy like a decent microphone, like a decent audio interface was really, really expensive. And then the popularization of YouTube, the broadband internet, the arrival of social networks, the popularization of people creating their own like televisions channels. I think all those facts affect the whole market. But I think the main thing I would say was the internet, the internet, I mean, you've been in the market for like many, many years, you know what I'm talking about. And this makes my story of being out of Brazil and being possible to do like voice overs in Brazilian Portuguese to anywhere in the world. And I think this is amazing. Other things that changed in Brazil, if you go like to do like audition today, they don't want the traditional voice anymore. This, I mean, this is all over the world, but in Brazil is being like a very, how can I say, mixed country. They ask a lot of for like, they're like more girls in the market, more indigenous people, more lgbtqa plus people of color. I think this is amazing. Brazil is such a huge work, a huge country. I mean, Portuguese is the fourth or fifth most spoken language in the world. I mean, it's amazing, amazing to see the things and people coaching. One day a friend of mine told me like, ‘we voice actors, we are like mini islands.’ And it took me a while to realize that, and yes, we are mini islands and I'm isolated here in US because I do Brazilian Portuguese voice over. And at the same time, I don't have my colleagues, maybe there's one here and one there. Like we talk on the internet, but I don't go to studios anymore and talk with producers in Brazilian Portuguese. I don't go out and drink a beer, have a beer with other people. So it was great to see like new communities when they did like, when WhatsApp is something that's very popular in Brazil. So we have a lot of communities, a lot of people teaching. I think it's amazing, amazing what the internet did for this whole change. I mean, YouTube and now TikTok and everyone can be like a voice actor. I mean, you just buy like a $50 USB microphone. I mean, not be a voice actor, but you can do voice, right?

Stephanie Ciccarelli:
Right. Well, everyone has a voice and I guess that's the common denominator, if you will, is that because you can speak, you have a tool, but as you know, Daniel, it's all about how you use that tool.

Daniel Azulai Bittencourt:
Exactly.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:
So as we're talking, I just, yeah, I just want to make sure because we're talking about Brazilian Portuguese for the main part here. And obviously there's the continental Portuguese, like Portuguese from Portugal and I believe that's called Iberian Portuguese. And of course what you're speaking is Brazilian Portuguese. So two very distinct dialects, I want to make sure it's just like in Canada, we have French Canadian and in Paris and in France, they're obviously speaking a different kind of French. But what would you say sets those dialects of Portuguese apart and how easy is it for someone to speak both of them? Like for instance, do you work professionally in both or in just in one dialect?

Daniel Azulai Bittencourt:
I just work in Brazilian Portuguese. Sometimes I do Portuguese from Portugal. I love the language, the Portuguese from Portugal is really rich, the books are amazing. Brazilian Portuguese and Iberian Portuguese are two variants of the Portuguese language. Portuguese, they share the same roots, they share the same words, sometimes a little bit different here and there, like how you make like a sentence is a little bit different. In three years, Portuguese from Portugal, the Iberian is like a bit more formal, but in terms of grammar, like pronunciation, vocabulary and spelling, they're pretty much the same. I would say the variants is more like in terms of pronunciation. Brazilian Portuguese is like a very musical language and melodic and Portuguese from Portugal is like guttural and nasal tone. But we can understand each other pretty well. I believe like people from Portugal understand Brazilians better than we do because we have a lot of productions, soap operas and music that we export to other Portuguese speaking countries. It's amazing. I mean, like, and there are a bunch of Brazilians in Portugal right now, I mean a bunch, a bunch. Yeah. I would say like the last 10 years, people moved to Portugal. A lot are coming back and there's even like a problem with the kids from the Portuguese kids that are there getting the Brazilian accent in the schools.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:
Oh, are they?

Daniel Azulai Bittencourt:
Yes. I don't know. How can I say? Like it's a reverse process.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:
Yeah. Well, that's interesting. I know that obviously with Spain, Spain, you have the traditional Castilian Spanish and then of course overseas you have what we have here, which isn't from Spain, but is a different form of Spanish as well in different countries, they have variations even on those. So as we're talking about this, obviously you used to live in Brazil. You don't live there anymore. You are living now the American dream, as we said, your base in San Francisco and made that move around 2008 or so. And not only did you have to move countries and presumably, I guess, pick up some more English if you didn't already have it, but you had to start a business in a foreign country. So did you find that there was a lot of work for you?
I know you've mentioned the internet being a great tool for that already, but what made it about San Francisco in the United States that was a great place to start a business?

Daniel Azulai Bittencourt:
Yeah, I always had this thing with San Francisco. I've been here like in 2001 for a while, then I came back like 2002. I always worked with Extreme Sports and Raider Show. I had a TV show of Extreme Sports, a TV show, and most of the bands I like are from here. And at the same time, this whole revolution going on in the Bay Area, I got here like in 2007, a little bit before the 2008 crisis. So I had to reinvent myself coming back here. And I thought it would be pretty easy. I would move, I had another marriage by the time, and I would move, I would be serving the same clients. I was recording in Brazil, I just sold my things, I'm going to come to the US and I'm going to do my booth, and then I'm going to start recording. And it wasn't like this, because the fact, this is like 2007, the internet was pretty good, but it was not that common to record over the internet for Brazil. And then some of the producers, they stopped hiring me because you don't see people anymore. And when they don't see you, they stopped hiring you, and then I had to reinvent myself since my Portuguese is kind of flat because I live in different places and my parents are from different states.

I had the chance to work with those companies in the beginning of the revolution. I mean, we had the boom from 1998, but we had this boom again, like in 2010, 2011, San Francisco was on fire, a lot of startups. This is the Mecca of tech. So I took the advantage of being here and speaking Portuguese, speaking English, and I could be part of the lots of interesting projects that brought me a different way of working my voice over and also opened my mind to new possibilities. So I had the chance to work with big names in the beginning. And since those guys, they require a lot of NDAs and you have to be in the studio. You do some projects like six months, four months, three months, you've got to be in the studio like physically. It's easier to hire someone who is here, who speaks the language, who knows how to deal with the audio and how to deal with scripts. And so I took advantage of being here.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:
Yeah, of course. And there are a ton of great companies, you know, some of the ones that are listed on your website, Apple, I know Waze is on there, Wix, Volvo, PlayStation, LinkedIn, obviously there are a lot of big companies, some of those based in the Valley, some not,

Daniel Azulai Bittencourt:
Yeah.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:
but being in San Francisco does afford talent, all kinds of opportunities. And as you had said, you did some interesting things by virtue of the fact that you happened to be there. So obviously there's a lot of work out there that is really cool. So you were likely into AI at that point when it was brand new and no one was even talking about it probably. There's also, I think you were saying something about natural language processing systems and then consulting for Brazilian Portuguese language.

Daniel Azulai Bittencourt:
Exactly.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:
People were building stuff and they needed someone they could trust to help them. So one of the cool things about being a voiceover artist who was actually picked up and left from where they came from is that you bring your language with you and the knowledge of how it's spoken. So how exactly did you fall into that? Like were you hanging out somewhere and somebody who worked at one of these big companies like, ‘hey, I hear you speak Brazilian Portuguese, do you mind helping us out?’

Daniel Azulai Bittencourt:
Yeah, word of the mouth and also like an agent. I have like a good agent here in San Francisco and then that helped me being part of a lot of those projects and in Brazil, I mean, people don't know me a lot in Brazil. They know my voice. I would say like WAZE, for example, I do the voice for Waze, the Brazilian voice for ways helped me in the beginning, some other people learning and knowing, oh, this is the guy who did this and then I ended up doing some work for other companies that are like their friends, you know, like they, oh, I need someone who does like a voice over in Brazilian Portuguese. Oh, come here. And then they have like a lot of video game companies here as well. So I guess all those producers, they know each other as well, you know, like that I said about Brazil, if you're in Sao Paulo, you're hanging out with other voice actors, other producers. I didn't have this opportunity because I moved here. The natural path would be going to Sao Paulo, you know, those people say, oh, there's this guy, Daniel, he's okay, you know, like he does the thing, you know, you can trust, you can give him like a script and he's going to nail and that happened here. But I didn't have a lot of other guys doing the same thing, you know, there are a bunch of Brazilian voiceover actors all over the world. We have a community on WhatsApp as well. We share our experience. We have people in Israel, we have people in Spain, we have people in UK and we are always sharing and now if you go like to Instagram, Brazilian voiceover actors, they use voice over. They use like the American terms, you know, like 2007, you could say like CEO, CFO. People didn't know what's this and now everyone's CEO or voice over. Those terms are being applied in the Brazilian market for a while. And then I started like doing this AI thing for a long time. I mean, the first time I did like AI was like in 2015.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:
Wow.

Daniel Azulai Bittencourt:
Unfortunately, I cannot say the name of the company, but they sent me like a video of a guy speaking English and they wanted me to film myself with three cameras and they would put the movements of my mouth in the guy and it was crazy. It was crazy.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:
Yeah.

Daniel Azulai Bittencourt:
It didn't air. It didn't go to the internet. This was the first time I thought, I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what's going to happen in the market.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:
Oh my goodness.

Daniel Azulai Bittencourt:
Yeah. We've been checking like the last three, four months, what's going on with AI and people since like July or June last year, like the main people were like, oh my, I just put like a prompt here and there's like an image here. I just typed this and that's the voice. I tried all of those tools, you know, like I put my voice and then it becomes like a lady, old lady's voice, a kid's voice. It's amazing, but scared.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:
It's weird. It's not, you know, because as we were talking, I was just thinking about how they have like the fake Tom Cruise, you know, there's the actor who kind of puts on the, I can't remember his name, but anyway, and that there's just people who are just, you know, totally into like the AI space, it's wild what they're able to do and just this week I started experimenting with ChatGPT, I don't know if I'm late to the party, but I started asking it a few questions here and there and it's wild. Just what it could come up with, like I asked it, how can you speak so that someone believes what you're saying? ‘Cause I was curious from like a voice over perspective, like what, you know, these might be good tips maybe to share with people someday. And it literally gave like 12, 10 to 12 points of what makes someone sound like they're, you know, honest or not honest, but just kind of like what would help you believe this person? And it gave all the traits and the things, the ways that someone could build more trust with the listener. And I thought, oh my gosh, like this is exactly what you might have gotten from your voice teacher, like how do I sound more genuine or how can I be the more relatable or something like this? And there's ChatGPT just going off and writing like within three seconds, you know, all the stuff that someone could literally be like, oh, that's a blog post or this is the basis of a conversation we can now have. It's kind of crazy just how much there is out there, but you're right. Like, you know, cause they kind of at first when you're like, yeah, they kind of filmed, they watched some guy and he's talking and then I spoke in my language and they kind of overlaid, you know, my mouth movements and it's like, oh my gosh, like that's, it's not motion capture. It's not that, but it's still like weird and, and like you'd never like your grandparents would never have thought this sort of thing would happen, right? Like it's even your parents, like even us really, like what do you think about it? Like who saw this coming? I don't know, Elon Musk, that's about it.

Daniel Azulai Bittencourt:
Yeah. I confess when I was a kid, when they said like about computers, this was my first thought about computers. You're going to write like a helicopter flying and then it's going to appear something like that. This like in the 80s, but seeing this like taking shape and being formed, I mean, I waste a lot of time searching and not wasting because I would say this is a waste. I had a new tools, a new text to speech and new bots that, and there are a lot of people say, no, they don't, they don't have emotion. Yes. A lot of they have emotion. People don't want to accept that, that a lot of professionals are going to disappear or like reduce in terms of like driving, in terms of a copywriting, in terms of voice, in terms of voice. You have to be aware of this, you know, and sometimes people say, I'm not going to do like a TTS because they're going to steal my voice. Maybe they're going to steal your voice and they're going to put a little spice in there. Even you won't recognize your voice, but it's your voice, you know, and you cannot sue the guys because they, they, they mix like two, three, three voices and becomes like a new voice. And this is going to happen.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:
Yeah.

Daniel Azulai Bittencourt:
And it's, it's happening.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:
Oh my gosh. But it is wild and I was going to say like for you living in San Francisco and being around all of this technological advancement, you can't help but absorb what's going on and see it in here and just have that affect your career. So is a lot of what you do now, is it primarily in those kind of tech spaces because of the connections you've made or are you kind of maintaining all the different genre of voice over that you've been doing?

Daniel Azulai Bittencourt:
I try to, to, to dedicate myself doing my voiceover job in Brazilian Portuguese. But sometimes I'm invited to do those jobs as well. And, and of course, lots of those companies are like three blocks from my house. I just go there and, and I have to work and I have to, if it's not me, someone's going to do it. You know, they need someone who speaks Brazilian Portuguese as they do, like with the English, like the main language, then Mandarin, then Spanish, and Hindi. Those are like Russian, those are French, those are Arabic, those are the main language. So they need people doing this. And right now they teach robots to speak, like machines, the, it's part of the thing. The things that are a lot of repetition, you know, a lot of the same pattern. So, and also, as you said, like chat, GPT, they don't even have like one, one terabyte of information. They have like under like 600 gigabytes or something like that. They just got like a period of time, like 2021, like from like some months. They're like some other machines that are more intelligent. They have a lot, a lot of information and we have to be, get used to it, you know, new professions are going to come up.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:
Oh my gosh. It can pass tests like lawyers exams or SATs, like it can do so much because it's got this database of information, it's fingertips, if you will. But yeah, all of this is very interesting and I'm so glad that you shared with us about just the differences between Brazilian and Iberian Portuguese because a lot of us get confused. Sometimes we just don't know. But they're very different, although they share a lot of the same structure and ways of you know, expressing an idea and also I love like just hearing their story about coming to America, building a business and coming at a time when the world was in quite a bit of uncertainty with everything that happened in 2008 with, with all of that and, and just finding places to connect with people. I think that's really important. You've, you've stressed how knowing the people you work with and being able to even walk into their office is important, you know, be it in Sao Paulo or be it in San Francisco. So that is so great. Well, thank you for joining us today, Daniel.

Daniel Azulai Bittencourt:
Thank you, Stephanie.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:
So, but before we go, Daniel, I was wondering, do you have any encouraging words for talent who are just getting started in voice over and they're looking to do well?

Daniel Azulai Bittencourt:
Read a lot. Read, read, read. Listen to what you read. I mean, the market's huge. There are like a lot of things going on. I mean, in Brazil, there's a lot of dubbing. Things huge in Brazil is like, they're like a new series, Netflix, HBO, releasing new things. Try to understand the whole market. Try to adapt to the new market. But basically is read and read the same thing later. Read when you, when you wake up, take a shower and read again. Ask someone to read and see like the difference. Understand the customer. Understand what they want to, the message they want to pass. Be happy.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:
For sure. Well, I think that the first step someone could take is getting to know you, Daniel, so they can find you on LinkedIn. They can find you on your website and I'm going to pitch that toward the end. But yeah, if they want to get more in touch with the Brazilian Portuguese market and just understand to learn the ropes, I'm sure you're a great guy because you coach as well. So yeah, thank you for coming on, Daniel.

Daniel Azulai Bittencourt:
It was great to see you. Thank you, Stephanie. I really appreciate the opportunity. It was really nice talking to you and I'm pretty happy of being part of the Voices community. I appreciate it.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:
Thank you.

Daniel Azulai Bittencourt:
Okay.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:
Thank you.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:
And that's the way we saw the world through the lens of voiceover this week. Thank you for listening to the show. We really hope you enjoyed it. Oh my goodness, so much information. So thank you to our special guest, Daniel Azulai Bittencourt, for lending us his voice, his time and expertise. So to learn more about Daniel and what he does, you can visit him on Voices. He's a top talent on there, which is a really cool thing. In addition, his website is danielazulai.com. That's D-A-N-I-E-L-A-Z-U-L-A-I dot com. So for Voices, I'm your host, Stephanie Ciccarelli. Vox Talk is produced by Geoff Bremner. Thank you, game, for joining us today, and we will see you next week.