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Forbes
17-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
4 High-Paying Side Hustles That Don't Require Selling
Everyone wants to earn extra income, but not everyone feels comfortable with selling. Maybe you fear rejection, prefer not to sound pushy or manipulative, or find selling physically and emotionally draining. In fact, research shows that 80% of successful sales happen after five follow-up calls after the meeting. The good news is there are many high-paying side hustles that don't involve the pressure of selling. By leveraging your interests, skills, and expertise, you can bring in extra funds on your own terms. Here are four options to help you earn more without the hassle of selling. With niche tutoring, you don't have to sell any products—just share your expertise. Somebody out there could use your help with solving difficult math problems, learning foreign languages, understanding science concepts, or preparing for exams. And niche tutoring isn't just about academics. You can also offer tutoring in music, sports, arts, and skills like public speaking, coding, photography, and even personal fitness. This side hustle isn't just fun but also financially rewarding. You can earn up to $150 per hour, depending on your chosen niche. According to Technavio, the U.S. private tutoring market is projected to grow by $28.85 billion, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.1% from 2024 to 2029. So, take advantage of this growing trend by connecting with other tutors, exploring underserved markets, and continuously refining your skills to adjust your rates. Want to generate extra income using your unique voice without the stress of making a sales pitch? Voice-over work lets you do just that. And you have so many choices: educational videos, corporate training videos, audiobooks, advertisements, video games, and dubbing. You won't just enjoy sharing your voice and improving your skills, but you'll also boost your earnings. For instance, audiobook narration pays around $200 to $300 per hour. With just one audiobook, which is usually four to six hours long, you can already take home around $1500. Even with AI's presence, the audiobook market is projected to grow to $56 billion by 2032, which only proves the increasing demand for authentic voice-over work. Of course, you should first build a strong portfolio, so practice and refine your voice and set up your recording space with quality equipment. Once you've gained confidence, you can explore different platforms, such as Filmless, and Envato, to find voice-over opportunities that suit your style and schedule. Great at organizing things, managing time, and navigating tech, but not a fan of selling? Virtual assistance could be the perfect side hustle for you. As a VA, you'll perform administrative tasks from the comfort of your home, including answering emails and phone calls, scheduling appointments, booking travels, and basic bookkeeping. You may also manage social media accounts, conduct research, create content, or help with organizing events. Other niches for VAs include web development, graphic design, and project management. The reward? Around $27.95 per hour and a chance to earn more as you gain experience and choose a specialization you enjoy. The global VA market is expected to grow to over 44 billion by 2027, with a compound annual growth rate of 20.3%. So, it's never too late to dive into VA and start earning with no selling involved. Do you type faster than you can think when chatting with friends? You could turn that skill into a profitable side hustle through transcription services. Of course, you also need to have great listening skills, strong attention to detail, and excellent spelling and grammar. As a transcriptionist or transcriber, you'll produce written copies of video and audio recordings, including podcasts, webinars, or even live events. You should make sure everything is typed correctly, fact-checked, and proofread. Apart from general transcription, you can also specialize in areas like legal and medical transcription. You could earn around $23 per hour. Legal transcriptionists can take home up to $83,000 per year, while medical transcriptionists can get up to $89,000 per year. By 2032, the transcription industry is expected to reach $32 billion, so expect more diverse transcription opportunities. You can boost your income even when selling is not your thing. All you need is to maximize your strengths and interests. Whether it's niche tutoring, doing voice-overs, or providing VA and transcription services, you can find a side hustle that's enjoyable and financially rewarding. Keep sailing (not selling). You've got this!
WIRED
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- WIRED
The Bluetooth Lady Speaks! ‘Voice-Over Actors Will Be Artisans in the AI Age'
Kristen DiMercurio went viral on TikTok when she revealed she was probably the voice of your Bluetooth speaker … and your headphones … and that gadget how-to video … and your insurer's call center. Kristen DiMercurio, the Bluetooth Lady. Photograph: Jackson Davis If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. Learn more. 'OK, so you have to say it with a smile, no matter what you're saying, because the shape of your mouth makes a difference.' Kristen DiMercurio is teaching me how to sound like my Bluetooth speaker. 'The resonance is in your chest and throat, it's very deep, very low. You have to enunciate every consonant. I do a slight amount of airiness. I'm practically singing it, it's very melodic. And there's a certain rhythm: It usually goes up and then down at the end. You get that unnatural, clipped sound. I've never really broken it down like this … Bluetooth connected.' And there it is. Something you've probably heard hundreds or thousands of times, and maybe never thought about once. DiMercurio, a voice-over actor, onscreen actor, singer, and podcaster, first went viral on TikTok last September when she revealed that she is the voice of many, many, many Bluetooth speakers, gadgets, and smart-home devices. Suddenly, she had 17 million views on one post, more than 700,000 followers, and her mentions were full of comments like 'OMG did you do the Duolingo Premium voice?' and 'Low battery, please recharge.' DiMercurio—or the Bluetooth Lady as she has nicknamed herself—began taking voice-over jobs as a way to pay her New York City rent while auditioning for Broadway roles and bartending in the mid 2010s. 'It took about six months before it was not my side hustle anymore, and I was recording full time,' she says. DiMercurio signed up to five or six online voice-over platforms and marketplaces, including Voices123, Voice Bunny, Fiverr, and Indeed. She recorded a whole bunch of backend workplace training videos ('Click next to continue'), phone tree systems ('That always gives me a jump scare when it's me'), and one DealDash commercial which appears to still be running: She was paid just $75 for it. 'At the time I didn't have representation. I was just like 'here are my rates.'' Between 2015 and 2018, DiMercurio also did a lot of voice-over work for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi–connected products and tech how-to videos for everything from speakers to air purifiers. 'I got something that was an internet-of-things device—probably three or four of those a week,' she says. 'When I got off of those platforms, I think I had done around 9,000 jobs. I mean, we put voices in everything in the late 2010s. Rice cookers and stuff would talk to you; I did a lot of those.' So when friends ask her, Did you do this one? or tell her that they hear her voice when they change the volume on their wireless headphones, she really doesn't know for sure. 'Some of the jobs had the names of products in them, but most were faceless usernames, the standard 'Bluetooth connected, Bluetooth paired, Bluetooth disconnected.' A few times I've run into it, but by the time it's in a device, it's been so compressed, and it's not my normal speaking voice. I'm like, maybe? That might be me?' The shape of DiMercurio's multi-hyphenate career so far gives some insight into a few more of the boom-and-bust cycles in online culture and consumer tech, not just that manic IOT phase. Before the Bluetooth speaker years, she was part of the indie fiction podcasting scene in New York, acting in shows like Ars Paradoxica, Archive 81 , and Wolf 359 . 'I got in when you had to explain to people what a podcast was, so there was the indie boom there,' she says. 'We'd have these get-togethers, and you'd hear a voice and say 'Doug Eiffel, is that you?' This was the Welcome to Nightvale early days. That's when it felt like the Wild West.' Later, at the tail end of the 2010s, DiMercurio combined the tech work with voice-overs for commercials. 'We did the auditions in person back then,' she says, 'which is kind of insane to think about. I used to take the train for 45 minutes into Manhattan for 20 seconds in a booth to be like, 'Chips Ahoy! They're in a bag!'' Companies would share celebrity references for the kind of sound they wanted, and between 2016 and 2019, a few years after Spike Jonze's Her was released, featuring the AI assistant Samantha, it was Scarlett Johansson notes for almost every job. Except without the signature rasp, higher pitched and less sultry, more excitement. 'I learned quickly—the client doesn't actually know what they want,' she says. Around this period, DiMercurio also started transitioning into voice acting for audiobooks, once again getting ahead of some big industry moves. Leading up to and during the pandemic, the likes of Audible and Spotify began pouring money into the original fiction podcast space, including some projects with big budgets and celebrity names, such as Homecoming, Black Box and Bronzeville , all attempting to innovate on more than a century of radio dramas. Kristen DiMercurio, the Bluetooth Lady. Photograph: Jackson Davis DiMercurio's opinion is that these were never going to scale in the way big tech expected ('with good mics, good actors, and a good sound designer, a $10,000 podcast can sound just as good as a $500,000 podcast'), but she still accepts occasional scripted podcast gigs, working on Caspian Studios' Murder in HR last year. Her own labor of love is the 'gay and weird' Brimstone Valley Mall , a fun comedy horror podcast set in 1999. She has written, directed, and produced two seasons of the show, which follows a bunch of demons who play in a band and work in a corn dog stand, and in which she gets to satirize her chirpy 'commercial' voice as the mall announcer. One narrative twist is that the Bluetooth Lady was not originally a gadgety person at all. After moving from New York to Los Angeles mid-pandemic in early 2021, though, she had to become a tech expert in audio and video out of necessity, to help put together audition tapes for on-camera film and TV roles and voice-over jobs for games and commercials: 'Actors are basically our own little production companies now.' Since the move, DiMercurio has worked on the fringes of the animation and video game worlds, and she's itching to get more into animation voice acting in particular. 'I've done a couple of those mobile gacha games, like Path to Nowhere. It's these very cutesy, anime girls fighting things. So you go in and you talk with this really high-pitched voice. It's so fun.' She shouts out the performances of the voice cast of the Netflix sci-fi animation Scavenger's Reign as a recent favorite: 'In the stoic character of the British actor [Wunmi Mosaku], you could still hear the heartbreak and her holding it in, it was amazing work.' Fast forward a few years in LA, to around this time in 2024, and DiMercurio noticed one big shift. A lot of her corporate, non-client and non-customer-facing work, the industrial jobs she'd been doing in the background for years, dried up completely. 'Just gone. And that was AI,' she says. 'I knew all that stuff was going to get eaten up, but I thought I had a little bit more time. It was a good chunk of my income that just disappeared. It went down to 50 percent, then dwindled.' Always planning ahead, she had already predicted she would soon be moved out of the corporate circuit because her type of voice was going out of fashion: one that's older, with discernible vocal training and a lot of enunciation versus 'a more authentic, young, hip Gen Z sound of 'I don't care, I'm just reading off a page,'' a persona which she does have in her repertoire but may not get booked for. 'But it was AI, just like that.' One of the platforms DiMercurio recorded for in the mid-2010s, currently offers an AI-powered tool where you can select a professional voice actor and one of 10 conversational tones, then turn text into speech with its 'Studio' feature. Now, the game is all audiobooks, all the time, for the Bluetooth Lady and, to some extent, major platforms like Spotify, which is experimenting with pricing tiers and bundles for these formats, and has just launched a new publishing program for indie audiobook authors. 'You gotta make some quick moves,' she says. 'I started auditioning more in the commercial space and jumping into audiobooks, almost full time now.' Despite the fact that startups like Speechki offer synthetic voices for this exact use case, DiMercurio is fairly confident that AI won't take over audiobook or scripted podcast voice acting anytime soon. 'We're in a space where, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You have this big, heavy tool—AI—and we're just smashing everything we can see with it. It has stuck in certain arenas of voice-over, the ones that don't need to feel extremely personal. But part of the reason why fiction podcasting became a thing was the intimacy of hearing a person's voice in your ear.' As an actor, DiMercurio is interested in how many emotions and 'micro observations' you can pick up on just by the way someone says a word. Some actors trust their gut, or do an impersonation, and others look at voice granularly, observing, re-creating, and manipulating the speed of the speech, the inflection and the placement, to function as a set of 'levers' for, say, producing different audiobook characters. When it comes to voice-over more generally, she thinks AI is now passable and that we may get to the point where it's almost as nuanced as talking to a person, but 'I don't think it will ever hit quite the same.' In the short term, she expects a flattening in advertising audio, similar to the sudden homogeneity in graphic design a few years ago when it seemed like all brands started to look the same. 'Almost every voice you hear, there's someone behind that,' she says, 'even the AI ones were a person who recorded that at one point.' But AI voices are designed to be palatable to the widest audience possible, 'therefore we're losing the specificity, the identity, the little quirks—like nobody's s 's whistle like mine do. You don't think about it, you don't even hear it, because it's so neutral.' Ultimately DiMercurio predicts that voice actors will become a high-end refinement in some industries. 'A human voice is going to become bespoke,' she says. 'We're going to become a luxury item, almost thinking of it like artisanship. So if you're a luxury brand, you'll have a real person's voice instead of AI in your commercials and in your products. In the same way that you can get handmade ceramics and bowls or you can buy them from Wal-Mart.' A now infamous case study showing the power of a single, distinctive human voice came last May when OpenAI was forced to pause the use of its Sky voice for GPT-4o, one of five initial voices for the chatbot. This came after Scarlett Johansson—yes, her —hired legal counsel, claiming that OpenAI had imitated her after she refused a request from its CEO, Sam Altman, to license her voice for the product and after Altman had tweeted this single-word tweet: her . OpenAI denied that Sky was intended to resemble the star, and The Washington Post then compared recordings of the Sky AI voice and those provided by an anonymous actress, reporting them to sound identical. The actress' agent also sent the Post documents to prove that she was hired for the Sky voice role after an open casting call, months before Altman approached Johansson. The actress also said that neither Scarlett Johansson nor the movie Her were mentioned by OpenAI staff, who specified that they wanted a 'warm, engaging' and 'charismatic' voice. DiMercurio refers to the whole ChatGPT ScarJo incident as a 'debacle' but notes there is a funny twist related to her own voice acting. In 2023, the developers behind the Zombies, Run! fitness game released a Marvel tie-in for iPhone and Android named Marvel Move, featuring interactive adventures where you're instructed to run around with Thor, the X-Men, and The Hulk in order to save the world. 'I got hired to play Black Widow in that game. I was thinking, 'I finally get to do Scarlett Johansson,'' she says with a laugh. 'Then we get in there and they say, 'We don't want this to sound like her. We want this to be completely new.' I was like, when do I get to have my Her moment? But I got to go home and tell my mom I played Black Widow.' Still, DiMercurio probably gets her Her moment every day, every time thousands, maybe millions of people hear the words 'Bluetooth connected.'
Yahoo
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Some voice actors embrace AI's potential. Others worry it's coming for their jobs
Like many in his field, voiceover actor Jesse Adam has been watching the rise of AI with a wary eye. "You start hearing better voiceover produced by AI and you're like, OK, this could be some serious competition," says the Saskatchewan native, who over the course of his decade-long career has lent his voice to dozens of projects, including Marvel video games and Starbucks commercials. With AI capabilities advancing at a seemingly exponential rate, he realizes he faces an uphill battle. 'I got to the point where I was like, there's no way we're going to be able to fight this. This isn't going away." So rather than resist the tide, he's decided to lean into it. Adam has long worked with a platform called which connects voice actors with businesses for commercial and corporate work. Last summer, the company, based in London, Ont., launched a new AI Studio initiative, which allows clients to buy clones of real actors' voices for text-to-speech projects. The company says it allows its talent to opt out at any time, and Adam was fully on board with that. He hopes for a future where his voice clone generates passive income and gives him the freedom to pursue passion projects. 'The industry is changing and I need to adapt or I'm going to get left behind," he says. Adam spent roughly 20 hours recording a range of emotional performances for the service — everything from 'happy and upbeat' to 'sad and down.' Since then, he's been paid for about 100 jobs, mostly for training videos. Each time his AI-cloned voice is used, he gets an email notification. 'It's not paying a ton of money, but it's also money that I wouldn't have had otherwise,' says Adam, noting the service pays him about 10 cents per word and he usually makes more working with clients directly. He hopes to scale up as demand for the service grows. "I think for some talent, the amount of work they'll get through their AI clones will be significant and will pay the bills and be lucrative." About 30 voice actors have opted into AI Studio, according to the company's chief technology officer Dheeraj Jalali. He says the platform expanded into AI text-to-speech services after seeing how quickly the technology was evolving. 'We thought, hey, let's use this technology as an enabler instead of being fearful of it,' he says. Jalali explains actors who consent to having their voices used can set their own per-word rates, with the company taking a percentage of the earnings. They can specify words or phrases they don't want their voice to generate, and talent can view the scripts their AI voice was used for after the fact. He says the service is primarily used for training programs, ebooks and website user interfaces. Since AI can't take artistic direction, Jalali notes voice actors are still being hired traditionally for commercials, films and TV shows. 'When it comes to mass media, voiceover actors are still there. I don't see any near future where they're getting replaced,' he says. But that's precisely what has many actors and labour groups sounding the alarm. The entertainment industry has weathered a rough couple of years, with Hollywood strikes and fewer Canadian commissions slowing things down. The animation sector has been hit especially hard. According to the Canadian Media Producers Association, animation production in Canada plummeted by 55 per cent in 2023-24, following a pandemic-era surge that briefly reignited investments. In the midst of this downturn, voice actors are on alert when it comes to AI. As the technology becomes more skilled at mimicking human voices, many fear being pushed aside and watching their craft lose value. Toronto's Gabbi Kosmidis has spent years breathing life into animated characters, and she worries that an illicit, synthetic version of her voice could replace her entirely. 'I know a lot of voice actors who are struggling to find work right now. The industry is slow for a plethora of reasons, and AI has been this scary, looming thing,' says Kosmidis, who voices the lead in 'Night of the Zoopocalypse,' an animated Canadian horror comedy that did not use AI, and is currently in theatres. She fears a near future where companies 'could take your voice and use it forever and ever and ever.' 'It's pretty scary in terms of voiceover work. It may make your job obsolete.' In light of these fears, labour unions in Canada and the U.S. have been working to ensure members have protections against AI in contracts with producers. ACTRA's newly ratified Independent Production Agreement has language giving actors the right to fair compensation and full consent if their voice or likeness are used to create a synthetic performer. Still, 'a collective bargaining agreement is not enough alone to address all concerns on such a rapidly evolving technology,' ACTRA national president Eleanor Noble said in a statement. She added the organization is urging the Liberal government to create 'strong legislation which will protect performers' likenesses and jobs from AI misuse, along with protecting all Canadian workers.' As the government drafts its proposed Artificial Intelligence and Data Act, ACTRA is lobbying to ensure any future legislation would grant performers the right to fair compensation and control over all AI uses of their voice and likeness. AI text-to-speech services signal a 'race to the bottom' where voiceover artists will get paid less and less for their work, says Kunal Sen, creative director of Vancouver-based animation studio Good Bad Habits, which works on a variety of projects, including films and commercials. 'I definitely see a devaluing of work in this sphere. I would never not hire an actual person to do voiceover work,' he says. 'If a brand needs someone to say something in a video and it doesn't have to be Morgan Freeman or some celebrity, now they can just be like, 'OK, let's just cut the budget from this and put it somewhere else.' It's never been easier to do that.' Jalali acknowledges that AI may drive down voiceover rates but argues that it also allows actors to scale their work. 'Voiceover actors have a way bigger opportunity now,' he says. He envisions a near future where actors license their voices to companies, who will 'have the potential to do multiple projects with your voice in different use cases." He says performers can now tell clients: "Hey, here's my voice. Now go scale with this voice and I'll benefit from it, too, because my AI voice can say a million words a day. I can only say maybe a thousand." "So it just scales up in ways that were not possible beforehand.' Kosmidis remains apprehensive about AI, believing it compromises the quality of performances in the long run. 'I personally would never want to listen to a robot, even if that robot sounds very human. Knowing that it's not really human, to me feels weird and disconnected,' she says. Kosmidis questions whether AI can truly capture emotional nuance or deliver humour effectively. However, she concedes it's likely only a matter of time before it masters the art of crying. "Bursting into tears. I mean, who can't do that? In this economy?' This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 21, 2025. Alex Nino Gheciu, The Canadian Press
