"Humanizing" Second Life

I need text-to-speech that sounds like my mouth is full while I'm talking...

taking stats from TeaSpeak, the MINIMUM bandwidth for voice is 3Kb/s. That's the equivelent of sending 375 characters/letters and eats away at people's bandwidth even more. Personally, the lowest I use is 5.1Kb/s, the equiv of 637 chars. Since the average sentance seems to be less than 1 80-char line, we're significantly increasing bandwidth usage, something like 46 times for something simple like "hello"

What? No.

None of what you just said makes sense at all.

3 kb/sec is 3000 bytes per second.

A letter/character is typically one byte.

So it's 3000 "letters" per second.

But that's a silly metric when we're talking voice. You need stuff like khz and stereo/mono settings.

Generally if you want FM-quality sound, you'll need at least 22khz sound files. How much space that takes up depends entirely on the codec being used to encode it. Raw .wav file? Yeah, your bandwidth is going to die. Highly compressed mp3/ogg/whatever? Much better.

Voice chat will not hamper most anyone's connection, because we all have broadband here. I've flown through dozens of sims while chatting on Skype (which is fairly bandwidth intensive, but sounds beautiful), watching things rez, and nary a packet was dropped.

I don't like voice chat for other reasons, but technically, it's okay.

LF

Yes! Additional animation functionality from default animation overrides to animation events would greatly enhance the SL experience. You listening Ventrella?

I really don't care about voice or sound. Most of the time I have the sound off anyway. But what I would perfer is if we didn't act like we were typing all the damn time. It is just silly!! Now if they wanted it as a way to designate who is talking what about a simple wave of the hand, or paw.. or tentical... Maybe even some (no slight intended) Italian type hand guestures. The typing thing is just stupid.

Sounds like you'll want to read this, if you haven't already!

Jumps up and down waving at Sage like a hungry sim /chuckle

I was in another 3D chat place (for 5 years) that had the text showing and you could have your speakers on to hear the text changed to voice. The problems were that not only did the voices go slower than the text, the voices were mechanical sounding...sure they had speed and tone adjustments, but they sounded robotic all the time. In other words, if SL goes the voice route, I hope it will sound better, have the text still as an option and the speeds will be interrelevant to each other. Sounds like an interesting idea...I also wish we could be rid of the awkward typing motions...I have purchased an inworld pda so my av looks like she knows what she's doing part of the time, lol!

What a good idea, which is why I keep suggesting it myself.

On a Mac, speech does not need to sound like Stephan Hawkings (no offense). There are a variety of more or less pleasant voices. Surely Windows has something similar.

Each user could select some voice features, such as high/low pitch, quick/slow tempo, male/female timbre, sensual/dry inflections, playful/serious. Then, *if* I choose to enable voice for someone, my voice sythesizer tries to use those choices.

i could even have a HUD to change things easily, and you would hear my changes.

Try your local text-to-voice. You might be surprised.

Could sync more than sounds, and it would really be great to have such a thing. I can think of holes, but I can think of many uses for such an event.

There's a nice sounding text to speech system at http://www.flexvoice.com/flexvoice_desktop.html

Sounds better than any other I've heard so far.

There's a demo of some there but even better a demo of the SDK, so they say.

What if I can't do a good blonde voice? It for some not gifted with good voice mimicing destroy the illusion of an Avatar too.

I have noticed on other MMO's it tends to create a rift between texters & talkers at times, you sometimes text "HELLO?, Pleasease answer me, can you help me, there is a gelatinous cube eating your backpack? And they blissfully chat on teamspeak to their friends till you jump in front of them waving your arms.

Having said that it can be great too when teaming, and some people can talk great, but seeing teaming isn't a big thing here, it could just turn into an extenstion of Skype chat.

Hi everyone,

I run English Village, an educational island where teachers can host classes, and students can find teachers.

Anyhow, i was looking for a way to bring audio into sl - and then came across a really cool tool on SLexchange called SL Speech Tools
http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=185741

Do a search for Dejavu if you cant find it.

Its really cool - once loaded, it will speak all of your SL chat, or y
ou can specify which avatars chat is spoken.

Then only thing id recommend is that you purchase the At&T voice samples - because the Microsoft Sam voice that windows computers come with isnt that great!

Links to the At&T voices come in the notecard when you purchase dejavu.

They cost me 35usd, and are 500mb downloads... BUT are totally worth it. --- they are actually understandable.

And can help in the multitasking department cuz you dont always have to read the chats when you are flying around - instead they get spokent to you!
kinda cool

anyhow

good luck!

Fire

Reminds me:

"Humanizing SL"
Not all of us are human.