Will Synthetic Game Voices Be Viable By 2020?

[VR Golgot]

I would kind of hope NPC text-to-speech in Elite, were it to happen, to involve all template text coming with an authored phonetic companion, instead of messing with the client transcribing written language automatically. It would include markup for all sorts of things, modulating for different tones and moods, speed, strength, shout, whisper, emphasis, pauses, mumbling, and so on, and so on. Data derived from a character's seed value would slot in gender, dialect, other voice box characteristics, temperament, etc...

Yeah absolutely, emphasis authoring and traits etc would be the ideal . Otherwise even very realistic voices/accents will deliver content in a stilted way. And risk being fairly inappropriate for the character. (A jolly-leprechaun pirate delivering death threats, and continually emphasising the word AND, or whatever ).

I believe at least a few of the services out there offer that kind of phonetic marking / transcription etc at minimum. And I’d assume generated voices could be manually graded by type and assigned to traits etc, as a basic version. (Although obviously all out ‘generate to spec’ voices would be the ideal).

My presumption is that such a system would still require a conversion process of sorts though, and still require a chunk of headroom etc. When you say a ‘companion’, do you mean an online streamed service? (Or an app?). Something not handled by the client etc?

I still find it hard to believe they’ll actually find a system that’s viable at runtime and recreates reasonable timbre and intonation to be honest. Let alone finer points like narrative emphasis / character suitability. But would definitely be happy to be proved wrong

(And to be honest, part of me would be fine with a ‘light’ system that had the odd leprechaun pirate . So long as it filled out the world, and worked most of the time )

 

[Kelster87]

Nice, but kinda pointless given the other holes in gameplay.. Until it's driven by a reasonable AI, TTS will always sound like TTS - and created mechanical speech will always sound fake.. Some are very sensitive to audio and I often find speech in games is a trip down a strange valley for my ears.

 

[govny]

It’s still too robotic for NPC use though I’d say. Even for fuzzed up ship-to-ship voice or vid comms. (Unless they realllllly fuzzed it up, using connection breaks to mask the intonation breaks and heavy static to mask the lack of personable voice timbre etc)

always much better than a text interface.

 

[VR Golgot]

Nice, but kinda pointless given the other holes in gameplay.. Until it's driven by a reasonable AI, TTS will always sound like TTS - and created mechanical speech will always sound fake.. Some are very sensitive to audio and I often find speech in games is a trip down a strange valley for my ears.

For sure, it would only be worth doing if they were going big on NPC presence & communication.

At which point I must cough

Spoiler

• Current file diving suggests station interiors are being looked at, as well as 3D NPC representations, who can likely talk to some degree (IE mouths are modelled).
  • Can't post direct citations, but you can get the broad beats here.
  • NPC clothing is supposedly done 'in the round' as well, IE so possibly not just front-facing camera shots as with this prior video from the files.
• Past FDev talk has suggested classic RPG lite aspects such as conversation trees are a possible target.
• Braben wanted work from The Outsider to influence 'Elite 4'. Could related NPC interaction systems be repurposed or remade?
• 'Meeting mission givers' was floated in the old Future of Elite vid etc

And as always, it's worth noting that the current PDLC production run is at least as large as the initial dev run for ED, and the 'Legs leak' has hit all its predictions to date. So the broader resourcing and direction of travel is in this general direction

But like I say, I’m sceptical about whether they could hit a quality level they’d be happy with, given the general audio classiness etc.

 

[VR Golgot]

always much better than a text interface.

For ship to ship communication etc, with enough static, I could see myself getting along with it, ay. Or they could even claim it was some universal translator maybe

Could be good alongside some form of NPC Comms, which they have floated at points. (See the piracy bit here. Although it is from 3 years ago )