Narakeet Review: A Narrated Video Editor

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Narakeet, formerly Video Puppet, is an impressive web tool for making narrated videos with an AI voice generator. It’s now out of Beta and open for business.

Artwork on the Narakeet home page
Artwork on the Narakeet home page.

What sets Narakeet apart is the ability to automate most or all of the production steps. From generating visuals, adding background music, and synchronizing media, to synthesizing voice over narration.

The tool is great for quickly putting together instructional or marketing videos, tutorials, demos, and more.

The narration features leverage some of the best machine-generated voice synthesis systems in the industry like Amazon Polly and IBM Watson Text to Speech. Although Narakeet’s over a hundred voice models in more than 20 languages are very natural-sounding and lifelike, it’s possible to provide recordings of your own voice narration.

To create a video, upload a PowerPoint presentation with the slides containing the visuals and the voice over text in the speaker notes. Or write script files using a Markdown dialect with additional formatting directives for controlling presentation and narration. Once a project is ready, rendering a video takes from a few to several minutes.

Narakeet simplifies the publishing process, too. Through suitable presets and PowerPoint templates, it lets you select the best video size for sharing on the major video hosting and social platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others.

Although Narakeet is out of Beta and some early glitches are gone, it still feels spartan and minimalist. For example, some handy features are missing like editing scripts, you can only upload them.

The free plan is limited, but it’s enough to get an idea of what the tool can do and how it works.

The paid tiers include a personal plan that’s affordable also for small creators. It’s a metered plan that charges by the minute of rendered video. A subtle point is you pay also for rendered video previews, not just for exporting finished video files. However, while editing you can generate audio-only previews for free, usually enough for spotting major issues.

Another detail I like is Narakeet’s integration with Google. You can sign up with your Google account and pay with Google Pay. Direct integration with Google Slides spreadsheets is planned.

This amazing tool has huge potential. With the ability to export audio, it might help narrate audiobooks or produce audio courses. But Narakeet can already save a lot of time and effort by automating most of the video production process.

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