Voice Chat

I know that my mom, who spoke solely spanish until she was an adult, and who now speaks english with no accent, still thinks in spanish when she does math.

BTW, maybe they can also hook up web cams, so that when people speak over microphones, their sims can move their lips, like on Conan O'Brien. No, wait. Bad idea. That really creeps me out.

Acutally, this is a really good point that no one else brought up. How often do you use the chat history? I use it all the time, if a lot of people are talking, or if I just get distracted for a second or for whatever reason. Voice chat = no history.

Furthermore:

But specifically not me? What did I do Darwin? What?

I used to play Quake Arena using BattleCom many moons ago. It was cool for a while but the novely soon wore off for me. The problem was the sheer amount of profanity. Now, I'm no angel, I swear like a <beep> sometimes, but when 90% of the talk is <beep>, <beep>, and <beeping beeper beep beep> I kinda wonder what the point is, as all that swearing used up bandwidth for no purpose at all.

I know SL would be very different from an intense two-team game like QA, but I think it would be very easy to offend other lifers unintentionally, as those <beeping> words just come out so easily

I'm against voice in SL. Reasons: Chat-history, and bandwidth... and the odd '<beep> you, <beeper beeper>!'

I'm intruiged by the off-topic discussion about thinking in first languages, and grasping language-concepts. Personally, I only think in English when I'm thinking words and numbers. Anything else seems to be more 'concept-like' wordless thought... like for example, thinking about geometry or physics theories.

Also, I have had this wierd thing since I was a kid, where I unintenionally see colours and shapes in my mind's-eye when I hear loud noises or speech. It makes rock concerts quite interesting

It doesn't really work like that, I'm afraid. Go find a mirror and say things like, oh, "baby" and "maybe". Try to see if you can figure out which word you're saying just from looking. It's not easy -- a lot of phonemes (I think that's the word -- it's been a while since I was in speech therapy) look very similar when spoken. Frex: F/V, B/P/M, etc.

Other factors include whether you're one of those people with very little visible enunciation, and/or if you have facial hair that obscures your mouth. Also whether you're a foreign speaker -- I have German and Japanese coworkers who're next to impossible to lipread.

Upshot of this: the amount of content that I can understand when reading lips is something like 30%, and that's under optimal conditions. The rest is guesswork based on the words that I catch, body language, and context of the conversation. (Studies have determined that this is pretty much par for the course for deaf people)

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As for how I think. Given that I grew up with sign language, I would say that language has a more physical aspect for me than for some. Frex, the word 'grace' brings with it an image of motion, like a dancer's arm unfurling.

Actually, I do have some residual hearing, which lets me use a hearing aid. For the record, deaf != what you think of as completely deaf. It's a catchall word for a wide range of hearing losses, although most people who don't have profound or more hearing loss seem to prefer using 'hard of hearing'.

But back to how I think. I've been asked this before...hmm. Currently I'd say a combination of written words, images and motion, and to a lesser degree, verbal words.

Its amazing what you didn't know never occured to you, until someone brings it up. As a generaly visual / conceptual thinker myself I understand the not thinking in "spoken words" but I've 'talked in my head' enough to find the fact that somone might NEVER do that facinating.


And then I have to note: I bet Nergal has never had to say "I cant hear myself think"

I pull it up a lot, for contrast reasons (sometimes it's hard for me to read the white text against a light background), or for space reasons (maybe I have windows open and I don't want to move them to look).

ROTFLMAO!

Yeah. Same problem here.

Gotta chime in again... this thread has gone offtopic in a really cool way. Thanks for sharing your perspective, Nergal.

I also use the chat history a lot, particularly at trivia events. I can read it a lot more easily than the white on arbitrary color normal chat text.

English is my native language, I speak english everyday, never any other language. But i think in japanese in my head. I've never spoken japanese to anyone before nor have i gone to Japan at all, but its always in my head when i think of stuff, lol, especially when mad.

You think in japanese... but you've never spoken in it?

<twitch>

interesting posts to read, but I gotta chime in my two cents..

Voice chat, if I recall correctly, doesn't use that much bandwidth. It's easily compressed... you can get telephone-quality voice chat on a dialup connection, even. Seeing as we're all broadband users here (sorry Shebang , I don't really see any noticable lag increase due to voice chat. Maybe an extra 2k a second during voice chat.

If you made it act the same way as text, the only people that the server would send to would be around the speaker, so perhaps 10 people tops (30 if you're at a popular event, but that's laggy anyway... there's solutions to that too)

In any case, I wouldn't mind voice chat... it's just another feature to use. If you don't want to use it, then fine, don't. Voice users/non voice users can easily be distinguished... for instance, a little speaker with an x over it by the person's name, to indicate no voice chat/sound.

Easy

Lordfly

Here's an interesting article on the idea of voice chat from a few months ago.

I'm not ready for voice chat in SL yet. I enjoy using teamspeak, and enjoy being able to communicate quickly with my friends and all that is good about actually talking over text. However, there are a couple of observations I have taken from it (some I'm echoing from earlier posts).

First - not everyone wants to do it. This is for a miriad of reasons - they feel it disrupts the immersive quality of the game, they are really a 40 yo guy name bob, not 18 yo Brittany Zeeman, they might just be insecure about thier voice (or as Nergal points out, unable to communicate effectively with these methods) .

The pro-voipers say "well, they can just use an Icon and so people won't voice chat around them" - no, no no no nononononoNO!

The one situation I keep noticing while me and my friends are using teamspeak is someone comes into our little cluster. They try to strike up a conversation - they might get a reply, but its probably half-assed. it feels like your standing in a group of people who are doing thier best to ignore you when really they are so caught up in the voice chat, they probably don't even notice your not participating in the conversation.

So the way it is right now, it seems like a few users are standoffish, even though they don't realize it, they just forget you can't hear them. So it looks like we are a buncha snoby jerks or something. So give almost everyone the abiltiy to voice chat, and johnny newbie comes in without a mic his first day and finds a world full of people standing in cirlcles, ignoring him. Now this might be fine for There, but I like to think we are nicer to newbs than that.

Also, as the wise shebang once said the first time this topic came up "I can take someone calling me a bitch in chat, but I don't want to hear someone saying that to me." I have never heard as much racism, homophobia, and other hate-speech in general as I did the first time I played Counterstrike on a server with the majority of the players using the VOIP option.

I had more to add, but I can't remember it - takes longer to type than talk - another good reason not to have voice chat - you won't have to listen to me rant.

bbc

Its been an interesting thread, but now I have to add my 2 cents. Gotta say no. Imagine what the next EZ Money would do with voice chat. Nuff said.

I've read this whole thing myself and it does sound like there's alot of strong arguments in favor of no voice chat...

BBC brings up a good point. The only problem with it is that with more and more people switching to TeamSpeak to chat, more and more newbies will wander up to circles of people who say "Voicechatting, can't talk". This newbie knows perfectly well that there is no voice chat built in, and will most likely think you're lying. If the newbies knows enough to say "Oh, they are using TeamSpeak.", they newbie then has to get the server name and possibly a login, and then actually open up the seperate client and login.

If there was voice chat built right in, the same thing would happen as now, however, they'd at least know WHY you're ignoring them.

Cool thread, very complex topic. Certainly one we've thought lots about:

From a technology perspective, Voice is very achievable at manageable data rates, high audio quality, with multiple speakers, and with no increased server or client lag. Technology has greatly improved in this area. I should know - remember I was CTO of RealNetworks!

Another interesting area in which fascinating work has been done lately is masking - 'shaping' your voice in the same way we use sliders to shape your AV. In fact, you could imagine a system in which you were always masked, for example - you have to design your voice the way you design your AV - no 'passthrough' settings.

So, without taking a side...

If there were no techology problems, and you could PERFECTLY disguise your voice with masking just like the AVs (man<->woman, age, etc), who would want to see SL use it?

I'm curious given all the great discussion here. Certainly this wouldn't address every issue.

You'd have to think up some way of caching all that's been said as a kind of "chat history"

It seems to me that voice masking would result in many people sounding the same? Many would have annoying voices, I bet computer sounding voices would be popular. Sexy voices would lose the impact. I dont see the point really.

There would be no voice chat history, you would have to be an active part of the conversation at hand or be excluded.

Voice is great in tactical shooters when time is of the essence, but it does not seem like it is needed here in SL.

I have sound issues as it is, I would rather have the Soundblaster driver issue addressed before we get a feature we dont really need.

I doubt we'd all sound the same. In fact, the exact opposite. Look at how many avatar sliders we have. No two avatars look the same (unless on purpose, of course). I doubt we'd hear two voices that sounded the same, as long as there are enough sliders.

Look, the bottom line is that anything There (or anyone else, for that matter) can do, Linden Lab can do better. They've created the best software I've EVER used, and I bet they'd do a damn good job of making a voice system. I think it'd be quite useful in SL. Why not just have a test run of it. If we don't like it then, they can remove it. I don't see the harm in a test.

I think as far as bandwidth is concerned, if you can handle SL, VoIP is a very small matter.

However, in reply to your post, Philip, I would have to say that voice masquerading technology would have to be EXCELLENT. Like... to the point where accents or speech impediments could be filtered or disguised.

Take the UK, for example, where there are HUGE classism issues, based almost entirely on the pronounciation of a few words. Or all the examples other people have listed. Compare this to written text, where everyone "sounds" the same: exactly like the voice in your head. It's equal, and only l33tspeak or horribly misspelled words give us an idea of who we're talking to. With speech, we're subject to others' prejudices and expectations: Who is percieved as being more intelligent, the person with the Oxford accent, or the Alabama accent?

If the technology existed to flawlessly mask or substitute accents, or speech impediments, yes, I would use it.

However, I can only think it would have to be done by some kind of system for measuring vocal inflection, then use voice recognition to convert the actual words to phonemes, reassembling the sequence using text-to-speech at the other end -- which actually would save quite a bit of bandwidth and be really useful for all kinds of things, assuming you had the CPU power to do it. So please send me a copy if anyone reading this invents it.

Also, if you were able to utilize that kind of voice conversion, you could then use autotranslation and have a written transcript... and people could (slowly) communicate via text.

But this is basically the holy grail of voice communications... so it's kind of a tall order. If you can't get it done by 1.1, that's okay.

I think Voice Chat would be a great addition...with or without masking. It's becoming more common in games these days. The chat history argument is interesting, but not worth abandoning the entire concept for (IMHO). This game already requires quite a bit of tech to get running smoothly...I don't see a $20 headset being too outrageous a system requirment.

Im going to say that I am pro voice but I will touch on the various issues and how they can affect the dynamic from my point of view.

1) Symbol to denote Voice / No Voice: I don't understand why people see this as a problem - could somone please elaborate?

2) Hateful, racist, speach: We praise this community for its generaly above par maturity level and then when something that might test those statments of praise comes up we cower away from it? Shame on us. There are ways to protect against voice abuse and ways to record it so it can be traced. Simply include the ability to record segments of sound in game and if somone starts abusing the system record them and send the recording to linden labs. Also: Dont forget about Mute buttons.

3) Uses of Voice: You know all those game shows, talk shows, contests, and the the like that people have been having as events. Would they not be MUCH smoother if people werent having to sift though text to find out what the last question was? (The obvious response being a complaint about people speaking over one another but, I'll note that Mute button again).

Also think about teaching classes, wouldn't it be MUCH easier to be able to speak while you were doing some action ? It would make TEACHING the newbies much easier. Which brings us to...

4) Newbies: If we have the fact that voice is available I think more people will think to setup a mic than not if they have one available. Also for the most part if people are chatting in voice and somone walks up to chat in text they usualy switch to text for the sake of those without voice (As stated: I've seen this in There, were supposed to be better, or at least on par).

And again as above, teaching the newbies who HAVE Voice (or can at least HEAR it) will be MUCH easier.

5) Bla bla Ashamed of their voice: Two choices, Don't use it, get a modulator (but if its an anoying robot prepare to be ignored). This whole imersion complaint dosn't hold water for me. Im MORE imersed if I'm TALKING to people rather than typing. And for those of you 45 year old males with 18 year old looking avatars.... Just dont use voice, your being weird in the first place, don't suspend our technology to uphold your fantasy.

Anyhow my buck fifty.

...? Er, wouldn't you HAVE to speak up to ask people to repeat the question or statement if you were using voice, especially if you were afk when the previous was said? For you, it's a matter of not having to sift through visual noise to get to the information you want, granted. But I'm not sure how well a voice history would work, especially when the event is ongoing. It's easier with a chat history, IMO. But that's because I'm not sure how it would work. If you can figure out a good implementation, I'd like to hear about it.

Basically what it come down to for me is that I am in a situation where it is best if I do not make any noise. I would be able to listen to voice chat on headphones, but I will not be able to speak. Pretend I play SL from a hospital where I am not really allowed to disturb people by blabing away on a mic all day.

Obviously this is my own problem that no one should have to care about. Eventually SL will become more and more voice-centric since its so convienient and I wont be able to participate. Again, my own problem and I would solve it by cancelling my SL altogether.

So anyhow, I'm sure voice chat would be great for everyone but just not great for me. Just had to get that off my chest

If voicechat is needed to make SL even better than it is and make it more successful then I'll support it, but it probably means I will be cancelling due to it at some point, if it does take off.

Consider this, a forum could be set up where people use a mic and record their posts. It would work exactly the same as this forum, but with voice instead of text. But no one does this, how come? Text and voice both have different advantages and disadvantages in different situations.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2002-11-18&res=h
(caution: strong language)