Voice chat!

With the addition of streaming audio (which works beautifully, btw), you guys are way out there on the edge of what can be accomplished with broadband gaming. So now when are we going to see voice chat? I realize it's a slightly more technical issue than audio streaming, what with the server having to be involved to determine who is within earshot, but if I could actually chat via voice with people around me, it would be the ULTIMATE immersive experience.

So is there any possibility of adding voice chat to SL any time in the near to mid-range future?

Lane

Actually, I notice after doing a little more searching (sorry for the repeated subject) that Linden is looking for better voice masking before adding this feature. Why? People who don't want others to hear their real voice can just *not use the voice chat feature*. Brilliant, huh?

Linden, if you really want to offer the capability to mask voices, then delegate it! Make the voice chat capable of passing the user's audio stream through a third-party codec before passing into your own codec for compression and transmission over the Internet. Then people can use whatever codec they want to mask their voice.

Lane

Voice masking is dumb. You dont want your voice to be known, then use the keyboard. That is the lamest excuse I've ever seen for not implementing a feature. Anyway, you can already do voice chat in SL, by setting up an http stream from SL to your chat server.

Personally, I hope they don't do it until speech recognition and text-to-speech improve significantly, because it would mean I'd be unable to talk or listen to pretty much everyone who adopted it. It's bad enough being around people on Teamspeak. Seeing that everywhere would be annoying.

A few years ago Matrox bundled some lip-syncing software with their g550 cards. The software allowed you to record your voice with or without filters and play it back through a 3D animated head (they had a few to choose from).

The feature was only supported on g550 cards, so there wasnt any fear that it would go mainstream, but the idea is still incredibly cool.

If we could stream our voices and have them translated into accurate lip movements and use filtered/not filtered (for AV immersiveness) voices, then I think we have the next step to a metaverse.

Oh, and there was a thread on multi-monitor systems...

Matrox makes dual and triple display systems. They arent the fanciest cards on the market, but for $500 you could get a pretty solid triple display system (w/o monitors, of course). And the color accuracy and picture quality with Matrox cards is fantastic (that's what they are known for).

It was a sad day years back when I had to finally give up my Matrox g400 Dual Head. hehe, only 32MB card couldn't keep up anymore.

Champie

Champie, you know that basically all the cards Nvidia and ATI make are dual-head, right?

im totally oposed to the voice chat

One word: No.

I'm with Catherine, Kyrah, and Christopher.

I vote no, for reasons I've stated before, ad nauseum.

No offense intended, but this topic has come up many times before. (I know you're a new poster so you couldn't possibly know, unless you searched for it.)

The king of voice chat threads, IMO:

/13/10/5727/1.html

There's ALOT of people opposed to it and it's not just as simple as people not wanting others to hear their voice. I use teamspeak in WWIIOL and I love it (can't stand to play the game anymore without TS)--but would I want it in SL? Heck no! Read the thread I posted (sorry, I know it's long) for an in-depth discussion of some of the other bad sides of voice chat.

Oh, welcome to the forums, btw. Even though I probably won't be here much anymore, after off topic being destroyed.

Not until they get good speech-to-text and voice filters.

I think SL should avoid the voice chat crap. I read enough about it on the PS2 areas and Xbox areas. If I wanted to be forced to listen, I'd go play that stuff.


Now, what I'd suggest if folks really REALLY want it that badly, go set up a server, pass the IP around and allow the rest of us a bit of peace and quiet like we normally do.

God forbid joe griefer go around spreading his hate speech just to piss off the masses at some event...

I agree with Julia that we should avoid this crap.

But I dunno about encouraging others to go do their own voice crap.... I've dropped in on friends who were all in Teamspeak, and while they might have been having fun, it wasnt a lot of fun to see their afk avatars zoned out all over the place and be completely ignored.

It's either text or voice. If you have both and some choose to use one, they alienate everyone doing the other.

Let's just concentrate on improving the crappy chat interface and stick to text.

OK here's my opinion:

1. Voicechat is GREAT for people who suffer from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome from typing so much, or would rather have their hands free for other things.

2. Voicechat SUCKS for deaf people of course, but is GREAT for those who may be handicapped and can't type/type well.

3. Voice to text would be a great feature, especially if it worked well and could be turned on or off by the user. Scripting support would be cool too (pet dog barking? LOL).

4. I agree that the chat interface needs some improvement overall... I'd especially like to see the chat text and IM windows dockable to the bottom of the screen.

5. As much as it MIGHT alienate those who choose not to use voicechat, it is a VERY useful feature and it should be an option that can be turned on or off (Yeah like in There).

6. As far as external voicechat programs go, Teamspeak is my favorite, but I'd prefer to have the capability directly in the software. I hate having to Alt-Tab out to other programs I have running for whatever reason as it detracts from my VR experience in general.

7. As for voice masking goes, I think it's a really cool idea, and people who want to use it should have that option.

Statements like "I'm totally opposed to voice chat" are totally fine by me, because YOU don't have to ever use it if Linden ever implements it. AAAH gotta love freedom of choice!

As far as I'm concerned, ANYTHING that makes the virtual experience more like the RL experience is ok by me!

Peace and Happy Building,

Arti

Kris has made the main point I'm thinking of.



That's a big deal to me. Don't split the community like that.

I concur

It's easy to say "if you don't like voice chat, you can just type". It just doesn't work out like that in practice.

In my experience in a mixed text and voice chat environment, people who choose to keep typing or who don't have adequate hardware are shut out. Voice chatters tend to stop reading simultaneous text chat. Any text-chatter walking up to them would see a group of mute avatars doing nothing, and couldn't break into the conversation.

I've also seen open hostility towards text-chatters -- the assumption is that they're not using a mic because they're underage or otherwise not who they say they are. Women, especially, are harrassed into either leaving or getting a mic on the suspicion that they're actually a 500 lb trucker named Turk.

I'm not kidding, I've seen this happen. Introducing voice chat in a text chat environment is divisive and shuts out a large segment of our community -- myself included, because I wouldn't want to use voice chat.

What Cubey Said.

I agree with what Cubey said.

There has voice chat, and I've seen this happen first hand. People become "the one who doesn't voice chat" and are suspected of all sorts of things.

What if LL made a feature similar to 'talk to'? (I think that's it)

You could be talking to someone in SL and if you both wanted you could easily select 'voice chat' from the pie menu. Both of you would accept and then begin chatting away.

Live chat would be the bane of SL if it were globally used and it would exclude alot of people, but maybe it should be an option for those who want to use it for small or private conversations.

In that case, I could imagine that a private Teamspeak channel would work pretty well. Sure it's more annoying, but personally I'd rather see LL development resources go towards things that 3rd party software can't provide to us at all.

Ugh I hate LL's reliance on 3rd party software as much as they already do (Poser, FRAPS, Teamspeak).

And no one really likes to use Talk To as it stands right now... it might work, but you still have the exclusion problem.

Yes - Its much easier to corordinate a team effort with voice chat - and not all my members have teamspeak!

Or they could be a 200 pound coder from PORTUGAL with a broken soundcard and a horrible accent anyway. I also have very poor listening comprehension, and I know for a fact we have at least one deaf user in SL.

Speaking/understanding spoken english is not a requirement for using SL. I have difficulty speaking good english though I have no problem typing it.
Yes, Cubey, I know a lot of people in the world are shallow idiots. But I dont hang out with shallow idiots in SL, thank you very much.
Someone who would be so willing to distrust and discriminate me on such frivolous grounds as my inability to voice chat is not someone I would want to talk to on voice chat anyway, let alone be friends with.
This isnt There, people. Let's not target the average, but rather the excellent.

Eggy, are you saying that by using voice chat we arent excellent? That by using voice chat we are simply "average"? Eggy, if you dont want to use voice chat dont. I know I for one will be.