Voice Chat Beta

Voice Chat beta client

[EDITED]

I wish you could hear your own voice, not being able to hear my voice along with the other voices is really annoying.

Particularly when you say stuff and no one responds.

What does the voice / no voice indicator look like?

I'm interested to hear the actual quality of the client. I'm not a fantastic advocate of Skype even though I use it, but I would hope that it is at the very least, on a comparable level to a program such as that.

They said the first voice beta was going to be limited in scope. Were you supposed to post this URL?

To hear your own voice, configure your soundcard to mix the microphone input into the output. If you're using a typical built-in soundcard rather than an advanced aftermarket card for pro audio, you normally do this using the Windows Volume Control panel.

To do this, right click on the speaker icon in systray. If you don't see it, go to Control Panel and select "Sounds and Audio Devices". In Device Volume, select "Advanced". The panel that comes up is called "Volume Control". (Exactly how to get here may depend on your motherboard or sound device, so fish around.)

In Volume Control panel, find "Microphone". First, set the vertical (big) slider all the way down. Then uncheck the Mute button, if it's checked. Finally, while talking and listening in SL, slide the fader up until your voice volume is where you want it. Be careful about doing this with your speakers on, because if you turn it up too high you can get a lound & nasty squealing/howling sound (called "howlaround" or "feedback" in the audio business).

You do NOT want SL to do this for you. If it did, you would hear your voice after a delay (just as everyone else does).

A word of warning about voice chat. Just like text chat, the order that you hear people speak is not necessarily the same order that others hear it. (Unlike chat, however, anything YOU say should stay in order, and people listening will never hear your second sentence before your first.)

HTH

Sadly, this is not the case. Due to lag the order is sometimes mixed...

hmm, my goodness, then they must have invented their own voice protocol.

Thanks for the correction.

Hey everyone - the beta voice launch is still limited at the moment, there are only a few regions set up to handle it and we've invited some beta testers in to help us work out the final kinks.

Once we've announced the larger beta, I'll be sure to point everyone to it!

Sent the following to their e-mail for the first pass at the Beta client that can use Voice:

I would like to participate in the early beta testing for SL voice chat, so you can get some early feedback regarding the opt-out viability, and the user experience for those of us who will refuse to use a microphone to access SL. I'd like you to hear from at least one person who is NOT a sycophantic cheerleader that thinks Voice Chat will be the greatest thing ever to come to SL.

In particular:
* I want to be able to test the ability to ban voice chat from a private sim parcel or a mainland parcel. I'll need to be able to buy two small parcels suitable to that purpose. If there is a way for a private sim estate manager to ban voice chat sim-wide, I want to test that as well.
* I want to see if I am going to be doomed to wear a "Scarlet Letter" branding me as a non-vocal user wherever I go for the rest of my Second Life, and weather or not I'll be stuck seeing that "This person doesn't use voice" marker on myself and all my non-voicing friends, even if we all opt out.
* I want to see if that tag on myself or on others remains visible to me even when I opt out of voice.
* I want to see if that tag shows, for me or for anyone else, if I am on a parcel where voice chat is explicitly banned.
* Heck, I want to see if I even have the OPTION to opt out of any participation in voice. Will there be a preference setting in my preferences that will let me clearly state "I will not use and do not want to hear voice chat", like we can do with parcel music streams? There SHOULD be an option that makes us blissfully unaware that Voice chat exists, except for the fact that some poor SOB near us is flapping his mouth and saying nothing.

If all this gives you the idea that I think Voice Chat will suck, you're absolutely correct. I'm a roleplayer, and I do NOT want to hear the real voices of the players who type for the roleplaying characters that I have known for months and months. I don't want to hear that sexy woman sounding like a truck driver from the Bronx, or that big burly Spanish stallion sounding like a pimple-faced teen from California. If they have been able to act well enough to convince me that they are male or female, or to portray a non-human character, then I DON'T want to hear them outed by their RL voice! Nor do I want the characters that I play who are not of my own gender outed by this contraption.

I can see that for some people, this Voice thing will be a boon. It's likely to be popular with Corporate clients seeking to hold virtual seminars and conferences in SL. It's likely to be popular and even profitable for the small percentage of SL sex workers who are actually female, and who have RL voices that are suitable to their stripper or whore personas. It's likely to be popular with anyone whose imagination is so handicapped that they can't see portraying themselves in SL as anything more than a virtual clone of their RL self.

But for those whose imagination isn't so constrained - for those who believed the hype that in SL we could be anything we imagined, for us, voice will suck, and suck badly. Because no matter what I do, my RL voice can't match the things I can describe in text. Ever.

So PLEASE, don't just listen to your cheerleaders and yes men. Listen also to those of us who think Voice in SL is not for them, and work WITH us, to implement Voice in a way that doesn't make SL worse off for us. Please? I'm willing to give you honest feedback. Will you meet me half way?

Personally, I would be much happier if the tag was only on those who have Voice activated and who are in a parcel that allows voice. Those of us who choose not to use Voice should not be forced to wear a marker indicating that status, and no one should be marked if we are on a parcel where Voice has been turned off.

Kindest Regards,
Ceera Murakami

If I'm marked with a tag for not using voice, you know what I'll do?
Enable voice and disable my mic and soundcard.
(Yes, I'm a dick like that)

Ceera, here's to hoping you get in the beta and that your typed "voice" is heard. If they can make it work for you, I think we'll all be just fine.

So will someone in the beta post a screenshot of the tag?

I have a problem with interrupting people on voice chat because i think their done talking so i decide to talk then all of a sudden they start talking again. Will LL have a way to correct that too? I mean since you can't scroll back through a chat history window for voice chat, your gona miss out on some stuff if i do that around you.

That's a common problem with voice-chat applications, and even with cell-phones, due to the short but finite delay from when you talk to when others hear you. When there's a delay like that, it totally throws off our natural cadence and our natural tendency to "take turns" when talking. About the only way I can think of to avoid that kind of thing would be a visual indicator that shows up in SL as soon as you start talking, which should be shortly before everyone actually starts hearing you, due to the time it must take for the third-party SL voice service to mix the channels for everyone.

Another thing I would like to know, but which I am in no position to test:

If you log onto SL with a computer that has a built-in microphone and speakers, like most laptops and almost all the new generation of desktop Macs, will SL just assume that you're "Voice enabled", and leave you stuck with an "open mike" that you may not even realize is live and broadcasting what you say?

Imagine the shocked looks and ruined relationships when someone gets outed for being cross-gender by THAT sort of bug!

no one on the voice chat beta can "hear" you becuase you arent using voice.

I'm new to the beta grid, but I'm signed up to do the voice beta test. I'm having some problems, mainly that I see no indication that the voice features are even working at all... and I tried to join the group for the beta testers and can't even find it. I'd file a bug report but it seems like maybe I'm just missing something really obvious. Any suggestions, all?

and/or if you're using the voice features and want to meet up on the beta grid to play with them, I'm around. Just ping thaumata strangelove.


Thanks everyone!

Hi everyone, I found a youtube video of the voice beta...
pretty cool!

here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PwsrEYJUBk

thanks fire! i noticed the mouth movement and body language when adam reuters interviewed mitch kapor recently. i'm so glad it's being used as an indicator that somebody is speaking, although I see the arm movement being rendered useless (much like the typing animation) due to the prevalence of animation overriders.

if ll allowed us to override animations via edit >> preferences (didn't jeska float this idea last summer?), maybe they could stop stand poses interrupting the typing and speaking animations - perhaps allowing us to override those with unique animations too.

Doesn't show the tag for non-voice-enabled users, though.

Wow, for a 2 minute demo, nothing happened.

It wasn't an official demo, it was some video someone made.

And it's still in beta. Boy you people are harsh.

Voice is the future, typing is not. You will have to get used to it.

I read somewhere that when they started putting electricity in homes, some people complained that they didn't want "no lectricity running through their house, it just wasn't natural. Candles were good enough for my parents and they're good enough for me." Some people sound like that about voice.

I played with the voice beta a lot this weekend and I have a couple things to say:

I think it works great. Aside from the usual SL issues, it was pretty cool to be able to speak to people and have one more dimension in a group of chatters to help you follow who was saying what.

Sadly, being able to hear someone doesn't make them automatically more interesting, and voice conversations tend to go into "long awkward pause" mode a lot faster than a typing one does. (That or you'd have the opposite problem, which is people telling you a million things you don't care about, such as that they were eating, that their mom wanted them to set the table, etc, that they might not normally take the time to TYPE. It could be a while for people in SL to realize that just because you CAN be talking doesn't mean you HAVE to be talking.)

I thought the animations were a bit comical, but so are most of the standard issue Linden ones... I haven't tried yet but I can't imagine overriding them will be very hard. It's actually harder to imagine what I might override them with.

Also, I think it'd be fun to learn to do a great impression of a Sim (from the sims) and wander around and speak simolese or whatever they call it when people address you. That and start the first SL choir.


In the end, this would be fun with my friends and a pain in a crowd of strangers. I love it, though. Good work, Lindens.

Voice is not the future. Voice is a medium of unthoughtfulness. Voice is full of problems--too loud, too soft, too much background, what happens when you walk away.
Voice is ONLY SUITED to a single medium: Real Life Communication where getting up and walking away is noticed, rude, and often impossible in the middle of a conversation.



Simlish.
And the only reason I know is because of that interview Colbert had with Will Wright about Spore.
(Wait...Spore was the topic and they spent more time on The Sims? Yes, yes they did).

That's what they said about Disco, the Third Reich, and New Coke.