Is anyone happy, excited optimistic about voice coming?

I just bought my headset and I am really excited. I can't wait to hear my SL friends voices. I'm excited about taking or teaching voice enabled classes. I may start an SL choir.

Voice communication is faster and richer. Words happen faster and tone of voice communicates so much more than words alone. Better commincation means better friendships, better romance, better education and better community. YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

OMG...more lagggg...I sure hope we can MUTE peeps at concerts?...or mute the retarded...

But, of course finally a way to tell genders from gender benders...muhahaaa!!!

(Oh snap...I'd better start practicing for my alt...thats my money maker...lol)

One of the beauties of Sl is that people can present themselves how they want. A voice enabled SL, unless it comes with the tools to modulate voice as needed, would erode that. I frankly hope they scrap the plans.

No. Not at all interested in it.

*shrugs* I can live with or without it. It's nice if I don't want to make a phone call to a friend, but beyond that? Eh...

i guess it's alright, but i probably won't be using it,
and what about people who have strong accents?
Or speak another language..?
I probably won’t be using it since I hate my voice unless I get sick of typing then yeah.
I think this is going to make tons of lag though.

So when is this coming to the main grid then?

<crackle> .... can you hear <crackle>....say a<crackle>n, I didn't reci<crackle...ansmission. Oh why doesn't this f<crackle> thing work. I can' TP there, too much <crackle> lag...and there goes my inventory <crackle>.

well the novelty of long distance voice communication wore off sometime around 2 or 3 talking to my grandparents on the phone ..

;p

I hope it doesnt lead to as much segregation as some fear.

I'll be able to chat with friends much more in depth and more quickly. I can talk to more friends in less time, giving me more quality time with my friends. Sexual relationships should be much more intense. People can sing! Karaoke bars will spring up everywhere! We can play bridge and kibitz! All kinds of board and parlor games will be much more fun to play. Script instructors won't go nuts anymore with my slow and confused question-typing. Group instruction will be much more effective. Live comedians may show up at comedy clubs. They'll hear the audience's reactions to their jokes. Straight men will continue to be fooled by female AVs who are really dudes, even with their "phony" female voices. (Why do so many people think transexuaSLs in SL will not be able to master a female voice? Andy Coulter did it and he's on TV.) We'll know instantly when a griefer is 12 years old as we'll hear his voice crack. I can learn a foreign language. Or two. We can express real emotion with voice much better than with typed words. Poets can read poems. Famous authors can come in-world for readings. Legitimate theatres will spring up!

We'll hear each other laugh. The sound of laughter is infectious and will make us laugh. How many times have you laughed by simply reading another person's LOL?

As a citizen of SL, you'll be part of history in the making. This is scary, sure. It may not work. My cynical opinion is every solution creates two new problems. But, wow. Second Life will be able to surprise me again in totally impossible ways. It hasn't done that for many months.

i hope it does work out though, and it is possible to have this to because There i think has or had it..

Okay, maybe that might be cool.

Other than that? Meh.

Voice in SL is fine, I suppose... if you have only one avatar in SL, and that avatar is nothing more imaginative than a virtual clone of your RL self. If that is the case, why don't you just call the person on the phone, or use SKYPE, or some other VoIP system that already exists?

For the rest of us, who believed LL's hype that this could be "Our world, Our imagination", we tried something a bit more imaginitive than virtually cloning ourselves. We tried to be what we would LIKE to be, free of the constraints of our Real World physical self. Beautiful men and women, all physically fit - furries - dragons - robots - whatever we could imagine. And for many of us, that means that the voice we were born with doesn't work at all with the form that we chose.

Many of us also saw the possibility to play multiple roles here. By creating multiple avatars, one person could be a sexy Gorean kajira (slave girl) today, a burly truck driver tomorrow, a domineering female anthro fox the next day, or any other character that we could dream up. Or all of them at once, in the same virtual bar. It was an actior's or actress's dream come true. But even if you act so well that no one suspected that those multiple roles were the same actor, that all gets thrown away if all those diverse characters suddenly sound like the same 20 year old boy from Chicago.

For an actor or actress, Voice in SL will greatly limit the roles we can portray. And it will utterly destroy many of the believable roles that we have created so far.

I will not use Voice. I will not allow it to be used on my land. I LIKE the illusions that good actors and actresses can create, and have no desire to shatter them.

Can't we have one place free from Karaoke?
And applause to Ceera. Eloquently stated, and i agree 100%. in the short time I've been here I've met some interesting people, made a few friends, but not once was I interested in the person at the keyboard, in looks or sound. The character I see onscreen is who I am interfacing with. And if the feared segregation predicted by some comes about , so be it. If people are that narrowminded or technoligicly elitist, I don't want to associate with them anyway.

I'm trying to get excited about trying to talk like a rabbit (my in world av).

Nope, it isn't working.

Will kill the vibe.

Lets not leave anything up to the imagination anymore... hmm, next we'll have pix of ourselves RL pasted on our avi's, I'm too busy talking to myself to listen to anyone else anyway.

Meggy

I'm quite disappointed by this proposal in general. As i have tested, external programs such as Teamspeak or Ventrilo work fine adjacent to moderate at most lag conditions. We don't need it shoved in our faces.

I think that depends entirely on how you spend your time in SL. Occasionally when I'm bored I'll go someplace I've never been before to be the curious kitty, and peek and poke around a little bit. I'll meet new people, some who end up being friends, but I generally don't go back there again.

The end result is a friends list that is very fragmented, for the most part the only thing they all have in common is knowing me, but only a few of them know a few others.

So usually I'll end up catching up with 1 or 2 friends "in person" while at the same time talking to 2-3 in IM who are busy doing their own little thing. Doing voice with anyone would mean that I'd spend far less time and with far fewer friends because it would effectively prevent me from having 3-4 conversations at the same time.

It's already very difficult (for me) to tell people that I can't talk with them because I'm busy with something, or simply talking to too many at the same time already. Usually they seem to end up interpreting it as "Don't want to talk to you, go away, shoo!".

If you have circles of friends who all know each other, and you all regularly/generally meet each other frequently already then I can see your point of view . But with largely fragmented friends I don't know how I'll cope . And I have no idea which of the two is the more common thing.

Your headset may get a bit dusty as it can take a while for a a new feature to be implemented after being announced, although I havnt seen any reference to a time line so I may be wrong. Just going on past experience. Personally I won't be using voice to communicate with the general public or with any of my customers, However, a good friend from RL plays sl too and we both spend the majority of our time building so it will be cool to chat without constantly having to stopping to type to each other. Although if we had any sense we would used skype, TS or MSN to do this years ago

It's in the blog post . They licensed the spatial technology from one company and contracted another company to provide the servers and bandwidth so the only thing that really needs any testing is the tie to in-world, not the actual voice capability itself I'd guess.

A closed beta is supposed to start next week, then a month long beta on the main grid for everyone, then a formal release where it's limited to mainland and the $295/month private sims (that's how I understood all of it anyway ).

Is anyone happy, excited optimistic about voice coming?

No I'm not interested in listening to constant chatter nor in being hooked up via a headset all day in order to yap. I wont be listeining or talking on it except if its for something very special like a class or something..

pfft...those are all positive things.

And as humans go...Look at all those positive things that we developed to help mankind...(let's kill a few billion people in the process first)...now see look at all the happy people...everything is pure and organic...like the effervessence of pure harmony.

Lets try...an unending grief-speak in every segment of every sim...especially the ones that would really appreciate voice chat and could use it in an intuitive manner...

More like just MORE LAGGGGG...untill EVERYONE HAS BEEN ACCOUNTED FOR!!!!!

With all due respect and Defference Mon Chere, Are you out of your Mind?!?!
NOTHING empties a Mall, or Bar Faster than the opening of the Karaoke Mike.

No, i think this feature will probably find a small steady usage by Some, but it won't really become one of SL's prime attractions.

Angel.

People who have those ideas should probably understand what plesiochronous means and that if you have a typical pop song at 100-120 beats per minute that each beat takes about 500msec.

Now if you are 250ms behind the beat, you'll be a full eighth note off. In simpler terms it will hurt to listen to. And that 250ms is being generous; latency can be expected to vary randomly plus or minus 100 to 1000ms. Forget about musical applications.

As for conversation, studies have shown that delay in telephone-like applications exceeds 250ms (that would be 125ms each way) normal conversation becomes difficult.

So in practical terms, this will find its greatest use where one speaker is addressing many listeners and there isn't free give-and-take of conversation. Fun!

i think i am going to setup a radio stream that broadcast white noise and other sound disturbance and i encourage every person uninterested by voice in SL to play it at full volume in their microphone whenever they arrive near voice chatters

How about that?

After all, airports have cellphone shields

Even easier. Plug a wire to nothing into your microphone jack and turn the gain up all the way.

You can tell people they are listening to the "song of the cosmos".