GoAnimate text to speech: what happened to the voices
GoAnimate videos made a whole generation of memes, and much of their charm came from the text to speech voices: flat, robotic, instantly recognisable. People still search for those voices to make new “grounded” videos or to remake old ones.
This guide explains, from public records, what happened to GoAnimate and its voices, and how to voice cartoon videos of the same kind today with free SuperClonica voices.
What happened to GoAnimate
GoAnimate was founded in 2007 by Alvin Hung, and on 6 May 2018 the platform was renamed Vyond. The old Flash-based editor was retired, and all accounts were moved to Vyond Studio on 14 August 2019. GoAnimate for Schools was shut down on 30 June 2019.
What happened to the voices
The text to speech voices were licensed from speech companies rather than made by GoAnimate. VoiceForge voices were removed on 31 March 2016, and in September 2023 Vyond announced that the Oddcast voices would be removed the following month. Fan names such as Paul, Eric or Kidaroo refer to those licensed voices; they belong to their makers, and SuperClonica has no copies of them.
Voice a grounded-style video today
The format still works: a parent character, a misbehaving kid, an angry teacher. Pick a deep, stern voice for the parent and a cartoon or kids voice for the child from the catalog, and hear each one free on its page with a line of 30 to 100 characters, no account needed. For a retro robotic sound, the Microsoft Sam guide shows other options.
Voice the whole script offline
Put each character’s lines in a separate text file and voice them with the free engine: install it with python -m pip install superclonica-cpu and run, for example, superclonica --text-file dad.txt --voice dad.json --lang en --normalize --output dad.wav. Use one voice file and one seed per character so each sounds the same in every episode, then place the lines on the timeline of your video editor. The engine speaks 31 languages; Chinese is not supported yet.
Keep it fun
Grounded videos are fan comedy. Do not make them about real classmates or other real people, and do not present a character voice as the voice of a real person. Catalog character voices are fan-made; share videos made with them as fan content.