Unified voice chat on the grid - what do you think?

I'm very curious about a new feature that may be on the Company's radar in the near future.

I'm relatively neutral on the feature, but that has been far from the case amongst friends. It will definitely affect how I do business, as I'll certainly be using the feature for business commerce as customers require.


The feature is a unified voice protocol coming to the grid.

What does everyone think - how will this change your Second Life?

Sounds quite interesting

I'm not a big fan of such myself although I have had many people ask me when I thought such would be implemented. If it can be implemented in a fashion which doesn't significantly increase lag, I'm all for it. Otherwise, perhaps there are a few things to consider beforehand.

I hate the idea.

For those of us who can talk well or don't have vocal issues and equipment, voice chat would be good thing save one's hands to play with prims, chat with voice. For those into one hand typing it will free one's hands up. LOL
But for those of us who don't want to be bombarded with people talking, can't talk for medical, equipment or even personal reasons it could be major annoyance.

I think this would be fun. I would hope it is some kind of external program you would log your SL name into and then find the sim's group voice chat session within it. Some kind of extra program you can download from the main site. I don't think the viewers can handle an extra feature like this at this current time; that's why I'm hoping it will be external at least at first. Hey, maybe it will be an exclusive Premium ability to boost the benefits of Premium accounts.

there is already limited voice on the grid for me i hate all that chatter makes it noisy in here. I might consider if for teaching purposes but that's it the for the rest text is fine with me hehe

Doesn't There already have voice? How well does that work for them?

I'd use it with my friends, but overall I prefer written chat, especially in a busy environment. With text, you can scroll back, you can see the name of the person who talked... You can, basically, filter the noise and extract out the information much more easily than if everybody was talking out loud.

Moreover, apart from these guys who like to type like "gangstas", written chat doesn't have an accent Not even taking into account actual foreign accents, I'm good with standard English, New Zealander, South African and a couple of American accents, but everything else sounds like a foreign language to me ! ...Hmm, scratch South African, actually. This accent is so pretty I stop listening to the words, so I can enjoy the music.

I'm curious to see how this is going to work out.

I like the way I present myself inworld and the way I'm seen without voice. I think it will be easier to handle my business without the person on the other end hearing my kids fighting over a toy in the backround.

If I remember, the topic came out before and Phil said he was against it. But that was a couple years back.

It would be an awful thing for those who use SL to play opposite gender roles. I think there would be pressure on everyone to use it, or their gender would be suspect.

I also don't like talking to a computer screen. Feels stupid to do it.

Not to mention I get nervous and mumble out of shyness when I talk to new people. Anouther things I love about sl, I can't mumble and have total confidence in text.

Non-english speakers like me would suffer. I can read easily, I can write, but I can hardly understand spoken, informal english, much less talk.
Voice chat would be useful for teaching, and for talking with friends. But I don't think it would be a good thing on public environments.

I already use voice chat with most of my friends in sl. We all use Skype, and when we are together we use Skype conferencing.

You can just simply say so much more in voice than you can type, and it really is great to hear people actually laugh at something funny instead of lol or rofl. You can also hear when a comment you might think is funny actually produces a stony silence. So you learn. That does not happen in typed Chat.

I think voice is sl is great, but I know some friends who prefer not to, and we respect that.

After voice? Webcams?

Rock

Good point. If you hang out in Ahern as much as I do, you can easily see conversations in several languages at any time of the day. Sometimes, I eavesdrop by copying and pasting into Babelfish, but that can be awkward. I am unaware of any way one could do the same with voice chat.

It's been pointed out before, but I think a great way of implementing voice chat would be as a optional extra, sort of like IMing a person. That is, main chat is still text, but you can open a voice chat session with someone to converse with that specific person.

I agree with Johan. But if ever voice chat becomes the general, accepted communications stream in SL, I'm outta here.

I understand it will be integrated with the SL client program and it will be quite realistic, that is if an avatar is to the left of you it may appear that sound is coming from the left and the reverse etc.

It is a good idea and will enhance the 3D aspects of the grid, personally I would consider using it, but also respect the right of others to use text, indeed in some cases (agreements between two people) text can be better because you can create a permanent record to avoid misunderstandings.

Providing it is OPTIONAL as to you speaking, but in general you will HEAR others speaking it is a good idea. I accept that some people even dislike sound in the grid as a whole but would point out the difference between land with good sound and land with no sound is quite startling. (For those who would turn their speakers off)

I really can't imagine this working too well. One-to-one works fine, but many-to-many just ends up being an unintelligible mess of sounds/voices or a constant "No, you first" because more than one person started talking at the same time.

If it follows the current spatalized sound option, you run the risk of your neighbour's chat bleeding onto your parcel or the other way around. If you restrict spatialized sound (or are on one that has it set), you run into the same situation where Lindens said it would be impossible to restrict regular chat to one parcel, since if you're both on opposite sides of the border, you won't hear the other with no indication.

The biggest problem I see though, is that sound is currently based on the position of your camera, not your avie. And while loosing the conversation because you cammed away is annoying, someone on the other side of the sim camming over and being able to listen in is just frightening.

Having an integrated one-to-one voice option (or even conferences) would be nice, but for the general in-world case I just can't see how it would work and be useful.

I sure as heck will not be using it if it is added. I use skype to talk to my close friends. I may not like skype all that well because it's a resource hog, but SL is worse. I couldn't imagine how much it would piss me off to be talking in a meeting in SL and the sim crash or i red-map. Things will get silent and i'll think everyones ignoring me. So yes Voice chat should be external.

totally not down with voice in SL.

It further divides the community. I have deaf, and hard of hearing friends in SL - and voice serves to leave them out of the mix.

There's already enuff of that goin on already with people doing voice-only for giving out information and stuff during events and whatnot.

Take a day in SL and turn off ALL your sound - unplug your speakers. Do your normal SL thing.

Different landscape completely.

I don't think voice will ever be that popular in SL for other reasons too. There's a lot of people gender blending and bending and switching and whatsnot.

Part of the freedom in here to be who and what ya wanna be. Voice could put a serious damper on all that for many folks.

anyhow I've said my piece. NOT interested in voice of any kind in SL. I'm ashamed that Linden Lab uses voice-only for the town halls. Not a very inclusionary move at ALL.

Me too.

I'm all for voice in SL. Now that the viewer has gone open-source the door is open for anyone to write a vocoder plugin for voice modification. Something that should keep people who play across gender and species happy. What if you're playing as a cyborg and want to sound a bit more 'robotic'? Wanna sound like an alien, fox, bat, cheetah, neko, dragon or whatever? Just tweak the vocoder controls. As for myself I'd like my SL voice to sound more draconic... prolly a bit grittier and 'hissier' than my RL voice. As for voice chatlog I can't see it being such a big deal to implement a lo-fi 22k mono audio dump.

Yarr! Voice in SL. But first, LL, please fix the existing bugs. OK?

It will happen, and those who don't like to use it will gradually be pressured into using it. People who prefer the computer to be seen and not heard will more and more be excluded from the social aspect of the world. That's just the way these things work.

I always found text to be a pretty good leveler- look at most meeting transcripts. You might think they're all a mess of people talking over each other, but at least with text it's easier for the quiet people to get their say. In "real" meetings, the loudest voice often dominates the discussion.

Oh and as for how it works in There, you hear some indistinct crackly stuff, then some kid walks past streaming bad Metallica around you at full volume.

Someone please think of the bandwidth!

There will need to be some way to detect who has and who doesn't have voice enabled (sorta like how THERE.com has a speaker icon next to your name tag). This way people don't get all pissed of if they don't hear a answer from you.

Joe the Newb speaks into the mic "hello!". 10 seconds later "this thing working?". "Dude... Answer me you retard....". Then they leave.

when i was in there i hadn't yet a microphone, well guess what happened? i was seeing the voice chat logo on all my group of friend's head and i was the only one condemned to silence.

And don't even think even your best friend will transcript it for you. Also Voice chat totally deconcentrate me, i can't code or build when i am on the phone or on skype, even with hands free, in fact i don't like when peoples call me on skype while i am doing something. In voice if you do not listen when it's said, you lost the conversation. In text i can read my history and answer back properly.

I vote agains.