A US homeless man with a “golden voice” has been given a second chance after being discovered by a reporter in Ohio who put a video of him on YouTube.

A former radio announcer, Ted Williams, 53, had fallen on hard times, but – following an appearance on YouTube – has now got work doing voice-overs.

Mr Williams has travelled to his home city of New York to visit his mother for the first time in 20 years.

“I feel like Susan Boyle. Or Justin Bieber,” he told the Columbus Dispatch newspaper, who discovered him, on Wednesday. “It’s almost choking me.”

Before being discovered, he was a beggar during the day, holding up a cardboard sign, and slept in a makeshift tent behind an abandoned petrol station at night. Mr Williams, who has been homeless for 10 years, says he has been sober for two years following drug and alcohol addictions.

He says he began drinking and using drugs in the 1990s and lost interest in his radio career, before ending up on the streets and becoming estranged from his family and children.