Masking technology or text-to-voice

What would you prefer first?

1- voice technology that masks your voice so you can talk to other people but have your voice masked to sound however you want it to
2- technology which takes text you type and turns into voice

I don't want voice technology. I don't know why. I just don't want it.

I don't want SL to turn into some visual telephone. I like typing stuff.

And don't forget our deaf brothers and sisters! *speaks from the pulpit while pointing a finger in the air*

Voice technology that takes your voice and does nothing to it. I'm so used to voice chat in Unreal Tournament 2004 and Half-Life 2, not to mention how common it was in There.

However, people's voices can be very jarring and mundane next to the fantastic and weird things you see in Second Life. No voice-masking technology will be able to turn your voice into something that can match a dragon, but I think "chipmunk" is ready to go.

I don't want or need voice masking I want to know if I'm talking to a 12 year old lol

To be honest, neither. No offense intended by that.

I don't need to mask my voice as I am not planning on doing any crimes and if you mean just for use amongst friends, why would I want to mask it? Unless you mean so that I could do fun things like make myself sound like Marvin the Martian or something.

As far as the text to voice goes, I would think that it would be cumbersome, slow, and probably full of errors of omission, context, tonal inflection, etc. So unless you're doing things with it like Stephen Hawking, i.e, lecturing, I don't really see a need for it.

If I had to make a choice I would opt for text to voice though.

Are you speaking of adding one of these types of support to SL?

I want it to make the other voices in my head STFU.

LOL

3- advanced text processing technology that allows chat typing to be lag free.

That's a good point Maladroit. SL is like reading a book and adding voice technology would be like seeing the movie based on the book: nothing's as good as your imagination. It would narrow your perception of something down to one thing, when it could be several things.

I keept telling myself that mushes were better than world of warcraft, but they just weren't.

And anyone who's ever played UT2004 will know what I mean about voice griefers. Imagine a prepubescent voice repeatedly saying "waaaauuuuzuzzzzzzzzaaaaappp" until you quit playing and mute him. Plus no one has the same microphone, some people have feedback or lots of hiss, or it sounds like they're shouting from across an empty cavern. And every third statement is "can you hear me?"

This is worth putting up with in a fast-paced game like UT2004 where a team needs to communicate and react on the split second. But I think there's a reason voicechat isn't in SL. The technology is obviously there, everyone has an audio stream going on their property, but it's not going to fit with SL unless everyone has a professional microphone and is an accomplished voice actor that casts well for their avatar.

i tried teamspeak for a while... yuck. i wont go into the frustrations involved but good lord, its hard enuff getting a word in edgewise with type, imagine being overridden by some good freind constantly, how long are u gonna want to be their good friend any more?? lets just leave things alone.


marilyn

I just don't understand.

Considering how popular cybering is, wouldn't people get more use out of speech to text? hehe

Dittos

This poll is badly designed, it forces you into making a choice when you might want both.

Sl doesn't need to worry about voice chat at all till it can deliver on the promise of world on demand, not have a 25-50 percent ghosting rate when deleting, deal with three ninety degree rotations and end up with a rotations that are integers instead of being off by .01 degree, etc.

For a hypothetical company that had delivered the basic 3d virtual world successfully that was looking to expand its capabilities both voice masking and text to voice would be very nice.

I am not aware that voice masking technology like what is being asked about exists anywhere in the world now. if it does, I'd to know where to find out about it. If one could get a voice of not only the sex and age of one's choice but also accents like, say, Willie the janitor from the Simpon's or Darth Vader's voice that would be totally hilarious and people would love the heck out of it. Text to speech would be fine, some of the modern text to speech systems in use don't sound too bad. Text to speech can not only be fun but also useful for those who have trouble reading the tiny moving text, plus one could be listening to the typed chat while building or reading something.

But again, fixing problems should be attended to before trying to add voice into SL.

I personally don't want a voice chat system that let's people hear my real voice, that takes away from the pleasantly unreal fantasy world aspect of SL .

I believe the reason why SL doesn't implement voice in SL is because masking does not yet exist.

I was personally surprised by this.

Using voice would probably interfere with those who don't want to listen to other people talk or can't. Text to voice at least gives people a choice.

The full set: voice chat, speech recognition, and text-to-speech. This way, anyone can experience SL in their preferred format.

I vote for Carnildo.

I think its odd that so many people would even be REMOTELY interested in having voice capability added to SL. Perhaps they havent really thought this one out?
But from a Linden perspective I can think of hundreds of reasons that this wouldnt EVER be added. It looks good on paper, but only as long as everyone plays "Nice". This is the internet. Everyone doesnt play "nice". This feature would go from COOL! to OMG! in mere minutes.
So... lets just knock out a point or two and we will see how interested you still are....

I wander into an area where I can hear conversation, yet for whatever reason the participants do not notice I am there. I like what I am hearing, masked or not and set my recorder up to capture the sound. I then take the wav file and break it up into song sized pieces and either load it up into a cd for sale or just stream it from my webserver on my land.

Remember all of those movies where that utterly embarrassing or rude thing someone said one day is played back over some public address system for the whole world to hear?

No... you dont want to be a part of that.
Nor do you want me looping your stupid verbal flubs and pervy sex chat into the house music being streamed at a club.
Nor do you want me somehow emailing that to your spouse.
Nor do you want me using your recorded speech as the voice over for a stickman cartoon.
Nor do you want me making a Max Headroom out of you.
And I wont even go into the "Hey... you want me to NOT loop this wav of you and play it publicly? Well for the small sum of 100L a week... I wont"... blackmail racket.

Something else that bugs me about it is this...
Lets say I experimented with voice in SL... even for just a day. And my voice was captured without my knowledge. Then the next day I decide I have had enough of it and opt out of that system and go back to text only. I could walk around for YEARS in SL and NEVER hear the fact that someone was using ANY of the senarios I mention above that contained my voice.
I could go on and on, but my point here is simple.... I am ALREADY annoyed with most of the sounds in SL! Friggin Squeaky Blobs, gunfire, explosions and chipmunk laughs abound!
If you think about how sound currently is intrusive, abusive and at times downright grieferesque... why would you want to add to it the ability to increase the tools at the hands of the jerks that already use sound as an annoyance?

If there was any masking thing in SL, I wouldnt use it. I'm in SL to meet people.
What would be the point in pretending to be someone I'm not?
Aren't relationships supposed to be built on honesty and mutual trust?
If you have something to hide, well, your loss.
Besides, I have a sexy voice

Do you make your avatar look exactly like you? For some people, a voice modifier would be just a part of the avatar's "persona".

Yes you do.

No voice. Even if it were possible, I'd never use it.

The relevant points were made above.

(besides, I sound like Velma from Scooby Doo :/ )

I personally have zero interest in voice in SL. If I want to use voice, I just go use Skype with the few I've gotten to know in SL that I'd even want to talk to. I know in There that voice is available ,and it's nice, but at times, people do get obnoxioius, and I'm not interested in hearing that.. 'Sides, I like text.