CALGARY — Bob Bavnani has a job that is both nameless and faceless. 

He can go to work in a three-piece-suit or his pyjamas.  It doesn’t matter what he looks like — no one ever sees him. 

It’s his vocal cords that matter. 

From the comfort of his home studio, Bavnani lends his voice to everything from commercials to radio shows and corporate videos. 

It’s a strange gig.  He’s heard by people around the globe but lives a quiet life in suburban Calgary. 

“My client base is worldwide.  I can probably say I’ve got seven continents covered,” he says. 

Bavnani stumbled on his career almost by accident a few years ago after losing his job at Shaw Communications. 

But finding work was a tough slog.  While applying for jobs, Bavnani, 49, kept thinking about some of his conversations with Shaw customers over the phone. 

“I was a tech support guy and when I’d pick up the call, people would say ‘have you ever considered a job in radio?’ ”  he says. 

Ironically, Bavnani flirted with a career in broadcasting while living overseas in the Philippines. 

“As a child, I was fascinated with how sound could be transported over the airwaves from a radio station to millions of pocket-sized transistor radios,” he recalls. 

His first big break came working for the Armed Forces Radio and Television service, which provides sports, news and entertainment programming to U.S. military personnel and their families. 

He worked for other broadcasting organizations while in the Philippines but ultimately decided to pursue similar interests upon returning to Canada in 1997. 

But Bavnani never really shook the broadcasting bug — and a career providing voice-overs seemed a perfect fit. 

“My son said, ‘Dad, are you nuts?’  But I gathered up our life savings and took a gamble.  So far it’s putting food on the table,” Bavnani says. 

His client list reads like a who’s who of Fortune 500 companies: Coca Cola, Mercedes-Benz, Procter & Gamble and General Electric are only a handful of the firms who use his sonorous speech to promote their brands. 

Television commercials are glamorous but Bavnani makes much of his bread and butter with e-learning projects, documentaries and book trailers.  Such gigs are not as sexy, he admits, but the money is good. 

The voice-over industry — once very small and insular — has grown in recent years to meet the demand for vocals used on MP3 players, mobile phones and game consoles.  Another huge market is audiobooks, which has grown significantly since the first “books on tape” were sold. 

Bavnani estimates there are at least 80 people in Calgary actively working in the voice-over field, although others dabble in it as a way to supplement acting or broadcasting careers. 

Clients are sometimes very particular. 

“They’ll tell you to be upbeat with high energy.  Or they want you to sound like Sam Elliott,” he says. 

The most common request is to mimic Don LaFontaine — the famous American whose voice is in so many Hollywood movie trailers it is often the subject of parody. 

Bavnani will occasionally turn down jobs for ethical reasons.