Mike Caslake a Film Sound Editor and Sound designer asked the Pro Tools Expert Linked In group an interesting sound design question….

I have a job that wants me to create a Robot voice with out seeing visuals, The Director wants me to send a few versions. Does anyone know of a Free or relatively Cheap Plug-in to convert the dialogue into Robot sounding voices or techniques on Pro Tools. Thanks for your advice.

Declan O’Sullivan suggested…

Use Soundflower to port the computer output into Pro Tools. Use the Mac’s text to speech to sound the text for the Pro Tools recording. 

Chris Linder offers another approach…

In PT the AudioSuite plug-in SciFi works great.  Set the effect to Res+ or Res- and play with the controls.  After that a little bit of subtle chorus (AIR, BlueCat, Acon, to name a few free ones here), and maybe some pitch-shifting, if you like. but these are just starting points. 

Jeremy Eisener had this idea…

I actually did this just this weekend for a project where I had to strip the sound from the Robocop trailer replace all the sounds. I started by pitch shift the voice a few semitones then I used the AIR Chorus (or possibly Air Delay) which has a preset called “Robot Voice.” Then I just tweaked the settings to taste.

Jim Diaz has a different take…

I use Waves Morphoder which is a Vocoder. It’s $99. I used do game work and there is a patch called “Robbie” that works great. I just used it on a post job for a robotic female voice. Used it with some SciFi ringmod. Very effective.

Chris Berls suggested…

Vocoders (in general) can give you a robotic sound. Search for the free ones, or maybe check to see if you have any lurking in the ‘modulation’ or anywhere else heading in your plug-in list. Ring modulators and even a little bit crushing (reduction) can roughen it up nicely.

Mike Vitacco offered…

Soundtoys makes a plug-in called PurePitch which has a robot preset. I’ve been using it for a long time now.

Mike unfortunately PurePitch is not a current product now. But if you have an older TDM system and Pro Tools 10 or earlier then that will be OK.

My suggestion is to use one of the many pitch correction plug-ins, although the easiest and one of the more cost effective ones is to use the Antares Auto-Tune EFX3 and leave just one note enabled and then the dialog will all come out at one pitch, add a little chorus and maybe some distortion and you are done.

Any other suggestions for Mike Caslake to try?