Tried Voice, No Thanks

I tried out voice on the beta grid this morning, and my overall impression was negative.
Most of the people around me seemed to feel the same way.
I only met one person who was really impressed with it, because he types slow.
It was a little fun at first, due to the sheer novelty of it, but that quickly wore off.

There were a lot of issues with background noise, echos because someone used speakers instead of a headset (this happened several times), tv and radio playing, video game in background, children playing in background, and various noises from people bumping their microphones and normal mouth noises and such that are amplified by the microphone.

There were also issues with people talking over one another, and only one person being able to talk at a time. There were some people using text chat that were ignored by some of the speaking people.

It was often hard to tell who was talking, sometimes you would miss what they said if they were a little further away and mumbled, and there were awkward silences that I've never experienced in sl before.

Then there are the language issues. SL is multinational, multicultural, multilingual. Many people understand the written form of another language much better than the spoken version.
There were a number of people who could not understand the english speaking group I was talking with, even though they typed english very well. There was even a person who spoke english quite well, but didn't understand us because we talked too fast.
In another area there were many spanish speaking people around, speaking spanish of course, and one english speaker complained about the "spanish spam" - referring to people talking!

Then of course there are the privacy issues, which I won't address because others have done such a good job of it, but they are very valid and important concerns in my opinion.

So add my 'voice' to the thousands who say no to voice in sl.

Your experience echoes mine, and confirms what I thought was going to happen before I tried it.

Concepts and reality are often very different things.

I wasn't able to join in, but I think voice capability is a good thing in some situations like workshops, if it accompanies the typed output instead of replacing it. Having voice means you don't have to have half the screen obscuring what you're trying to make and can concentrate on your object.

But it's not gonna work in normal social settings where several people might be trying to talk at once one moment, and then no on be able to think of anything to say the next.

Anyway I don't think Whisper, Say and Shout have their distances right. Whisper should be under 2m and say no more than 20. If that's not adjusted, voice chat is going to be a nightmare.

I agree that voice will have its place. I'd LOVE to attend language classes, for one thing, where I could type AND hear the right pronunciation.

I just don't want to go anywhere near it for the standard SL experience. Too much random noise, too much chaos, too much RL info about people I don't want to know about, and I am going to do whatever I can to support people who don't want to be vilified for not choosing voice, by swelling their numbers - at least by one

I wouldnt mind chatting with a few very close friends, but I hope voice doesnt replace typing as a whole. I think I'd much rather do my business dealings via text than with chat when my kids are wrestling on the sofa behind me screaming about who had the magnadoodle first.

I think you have hit the nail on the proverbial head about the real utility of voice. As many have observed here, it just is absurdly annoying in a social context. The main draw for the few who like it seems to be a certain novelty level (oh, and for all those fellows who are deathly afraid that their call girl of the eve is actually a man )

But stepping away from that into a controlled environment, such as a lecture or a language class, one can definitely see uses. With just a few people, all of whom presumbably wish to listen and aren't about to talk over each other, the "chatter effect" is diminished. Time can be spent at the beginning of the session tweaking and adjusting everyone's hardware, reducing issues of annoying feedback or excessive volume. Issues of harassment and worries about anonymity are far less in, for example, a language class on private land that one need spend money for (yes, spend--voice is, and I suspect will always be, driven by business considerations).

Is this the standard "go to SL to build and socialize" experience? No, but voice is hardly necessary for that. Is it something else useful that can exist concurrently on the grid with the other, text-based, SL we know and love? Yes.

what you discribe is totally normal to voip with random groups, just wait untill you get the sheer excitement of some stranger...

sneezing in your ear
blowing their nose
coughing up a smokers loogie
belching
hitting a bong
cracking a beer/soda
yelling at their kids
talking dirty to the dog
feedback
LOUD MIC SYNDROME
in combination with
quiet mic syndrome
verbal abuse/greifing
arguments
mic falling off of desk
mic falling off of head
drunken rambling
drunken rambling with blackouts
angry drunken rambling with blackouts
joint smoking
hunh? what did you say (x 35 times a second)
ect


if you cant tell, that perticular checkbox will not be turned on over here

Voice doesn't work well when there's a ton of groups of people talking amongst each other in a single area. However for just talking to a couple of friends in a quiet area or for when a bigger group of people are all talking to each other in a single conversation, voice works just fine, which is what I use SL for mostly anyway.

I imagine areas that find voice doesn't work well for them like clubs and large meeting/welcome areas will have voice disabled in them. But just because voice doesn't work well with a bunch of people in one area doesn't mean you should disable it all togeather.

There's a reason why party phone lines don't exist anymore, while conference calls and regular calls still do.

What I've found with Voice is that in a group of more than 3 people, it ends up being a single person telling a long, stupid story and getting upset when other people want to talk. Or just people being dips about it, and talking over conversations. Plus, on the Beta grid, where there's not a lot of space to wander, there were multiple instances where there was no choice but to have to listen to one conversation in order to have one of our own.

Not to mention that SL's volume settings for Voice means that my computer's volume has to be turned up to 4x the volume I usually have anything. May my ears have mercy if I get an IM while Voice is on.

Not to mention that with text you don't get:

"Uh, um, errr..." (save for effect to indicate confusion or bemusement)
"And she was, like, totally, you know..."

or accents, be they dialects or people not speaking their native languages