voice chat

It would be nice if you could some how enable voicechat within the world.

It's coming in one of the new versions, a couple months down the road.

LF

Yes Fire, this will be implimented when, according to developers "we can mask voices in a way that doesn't sounds like poop."

Is there some other defacto standard that folks have been using for voice chat? Teamspeak? Rogerwilco? Skype?

Skype is great btw - I was shocked at the sound quality. However, not sure how good it would be in addition to running SL.

Teamspeak and RogerWilco are both designed to run in conjunction with Multiplayer games, so I'm sure they'd work with SL. Of those two, I've heard the most good about Teamspeak.

Anyone?

Ok... upon further searching, it looks like conversations around voice chatting have been beaten to death. Also, it looks like Teamspeak is usually suggested if you want to use outside voice chat.

It's interesting to note that SL is working on how to mask our voices in voice chat before they add it as a feature. Intersting. Indeed.

Bah they should just implement it now and mask it later

..will we have a menu for voice masking? with slider bars? lol

Pitch
Lower<-------->Higher

Distortion
Less<--------->More

Flange
Less<--------->More

Warble
Less<--------->More

Temperance
Softer<------->More Gruff


oh.. the possibilities...

I'm really excited about how LL is going about this, I'm glad they're thinking ahead and thinking of it.

That would be neat Cybin, also if you could give yourself an accent:

Twang:

Southern<---------->European

Etc , I'd love to be from Australia for awhile!

Hehe

You would need a southern translator though.......

"Hey you guys! Whats up?".......
Translated to....
"Howdy ya'll! How ya'll do'in?"

Incredibly, the Lindens seemed lukewarm at best when I requested (okay, demanded) realtime speech recognition, syllabic emphasis and pitch tracking, transfer as plaintext, then outputting it using pitch-adjusted phoneme reconstruction in 1.2.

Maybe I wasn't loud enough.

As a There refugee, I would LOVE to see voice chat implimented in Second Life. It is the biggest major difference between the games and makes for a much more interactive social climate.

Please, Linden Labs, put voice chat on the top of your priority list!!

I can see some reasons why the could be disasterous also, mind you. Fear those parties, which already can take the sims to it's knees and cause clients to drop to 3fps. Toss in the bandwidth requirement of tossing the speech of all the partiers into the equation. Add in the overhead of transposing/modulating all those partiers speech. Sure people could talk then, but could they even move afterwards?Not to mention, it would become incredibly difficult to enforce some aspects of the TOS.

Catherine, while the text->speech bit would make it bandwidth possible, I can't say I have been too impressed with computer synth'd speech.

I would just like to know exactly why would people need to mask their voice.
The people who are pressing for voice chat would probably not even want their voice altered in any way.
I wouldn't want to mask my voice either.
Yes, I know people can be "anything", but lets be realistic, what is the percentage of people who actually wear a "creative" avatar instead of a plain humanoid one?

can we have a voice setting for alternate-reality beings?

Yeah, uh... I know, Alondria. What I was asking for won't be possible, let alone practical for another 10 or 20 years. It was... you know, one of those "joke" things.

Please don't!

As a person that has headphones instead of speakers on my computer, and hardly ever wears them, I'd prefer not to have voice chat at all.

And I REALLY don't want to lose bandwidth downloading streaming voice, when I'm not even going to hear it.

If/when voice is implemented, my social participation will drop to virtually nill.

God forbid someone walk up and start talking to me while I'm building/texturing/scripting. I'll never even know you're there.

Because it would sound funny hearing a deep baritone voice coming from a dainty female av?

Voice doesnt need to use tonnes of bandwidth. You can squeeze telephone-quality voice into under 5kbps using certain codecs.

Of course, if everyone is sending their audio to everyone, then youd be getting 5 * number of people within hearing range kbps, which is less nice.

Mostly though there's less than 5ish people within hearing range, the exception being parties and large events, so you'd still be getting less than 25kbps for voice.

Parties and large events can be treated as exceptions. Maybe just ask everyone to disable sending voice whilst theyre at a party?

... or enable conferencing via a DSP farm at Linden

(probably easiest just to do peer-to-peer with maximum audio channels capped at 5, or configurable in options)

Azelda

I don’t see how you would loose a significant amount of bandwidth on a DSL or Cable connection. Voice chat is not bad at all *ESPECIALLY* when your scripting or doing other things that block the chat window. I mean, when I was making t-shirts and doing that sort of stuff, I was able to recognize and talk to my buddy without flipping / minimizing windows. Also, ever since voice was added to the beta in "There" back in the day, my vocal participation has really jumped, group conversations are now exciding! and entertaining! Is it me or is it that plain chatting seems a bit limiting compared to the voice chat with animated expressions. I'd say if "There" can pull off voice chat at the last stages of their beta, then voice would be a piece of cake for linden research to implement. And for so many people I know, it means a big difference in deciding whether or not to drain part of an allowance/paycheck on an 3d world. I would strongly suggest that Second Life consider Voice Chat a high priority! It would mean a whole lot to a great deal of people.

just my 2 cents

I'm gonna take a wild guess here and assume that people who dont want to give out their RL gender arent the ones clamoring for voice chat... no one forces you to use voice chat, but those who want it should be able to have it.
Anyway, with the new http streaming thang, its only a matter of time until someone figures out how to easily integrate it with some sort of preexisting voice chat software... come to think of it, windows media server would probably do.

Well... traditionally, in eq I always had a female character because I found that tended to work to one's advantage, especially on a PvP server.

In SL, I have female avs because it's something to look at whilst you're scripting

In SL I'd have no problems talking with my normal voice, and pretty sure you wouldnt either right Eggy?

DII is probably the best illustration of this. All sorcs are female, but no-one pretends to be really female in RL. You could stick a TeamSpeak thing over DII with no major worries.

Azelda

Well, the current streaming parcel audio that will be in 1.4 would allow one person to make an internet radio channel and broadcast their voice onto it, right? That would make Philip's town hall's much more intersting

In DII (Diablo II, I presume?), the game is the focus, and everything else, such as the image you project of yourself, is secondary to that. In SL, that image is one of the focuses. As a result, a voice chat system that doesn't let you match your voice to the rest of the image you project isn't much good.

I'm going to have to bump this as, having come from There's very rich voice enabled social environment, I consider this a major step in the right direction. There is much more meaning that can be conveyed through speech than can through typing, especially for those who's typing skills aren't all that great.

As mentioned beforehand, full duplex voice over IP technology has made great strides and you can hold very clear conversations using ridiculously small bitrates, so bandwidth usage should not be an issue, at least not compared to SL's other bandwidth concerns. And speaking from the perspective of a Thereian, voice chatting was *not* the major cause of lag There either.

To counter a previous comment, a visual indicator when someone uses voice would be a good idea, so that someone who could not hear voice could reply in kind so that the other person could switch to text. We had that in There, came in handy.

Now ... I would highly recommend enabling standard voice chat as soon as possible and adding on voice modulation and alteration at a later date when the technology permits. While I understand the reasoning behind wishing modulation tools in place, many of us don't honestly care about sounding like a Cylon or a demon. Furthermore, from a marketing standpoint, *now* would be the best time ... Voice chatting is one of There's major merits as they have implemented it exceedingly well. Given how both There inc and its member base are sitting on the fence right now, offering such a service could easily tip the scales in Linden's favor before most of the community decide they wish to stay and deal with the diminished support ... already, loyalty is back on the rise since Brett's Q&A session (Follow The Red Bouncing Ball, heh ... okay, that's an inside joke only a Thereian could understand, lol) and the therebuck is also back on the rise and rising still. Timing, people!

I came from There and thats one thing I deffinatly miss!!!