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[xabre]

I've been looking at a few text-to-speech programs recently, such as this one. This type of software has seemingly come a long way since the days of Microsoft Sam. I imagine it would prove very useful for sport game commentary, in which case the pitch and tone of the voice could be changed to suit various situations, such as excitement or annoyance for example. It would also significantly eliminate repetitive sport commentary that has been a problem in sports games from the moment commentary was first used in them.

So has text-to-speech synthesis reached a point where it is viable for use in games, i.e. is it natural sounding enough yet? Or does the technology still need more time to mature?

 

[Kon Tiki]

I can not play UT2k4 with text to speech on. I die too much from the laughing.

 

[xabre]

Yeah I saw it had the option but I've never used it.

 

[hobbitx]

I think it would be good in an rpg or adventure type game where you deal with alot of mechanized characters, but I don't know if using it for people would be a good idea. I've heard alot of the newer TTS engines and they do sound amazingly human-like at times, but it's all still monotone. People already complain enough about voice actors sounding dull and bot-like, unless they really tweak the bots to have more emotion in their tone, I just don't know for humans.

 

[Kobun Heat]

Animal Crossing did it. It was hilarious getting them to say things like "douchebag."

 

[FightyF]

I was thinking of using vocoders for sports commentator voices to achieve the same effect.

 

[Lazy8s]

My Hearsay 1000 I had way back for the Commodore 64 wasn't bad at all for text-to-speech.

 

[Kiriku]

Text-to-speech would probably only become irritating in the end, unless they manage to come up with a system that adds emotion to the voices. Hell, some "voice acting" in games nowadays lacks just about any kind of emotions. That's bad enough as it is.

 

[Burger]

Anyone remember Dr. Spaitso ?? Came with the 8bit Soundblaster expansion card for your home PC. Man that was some funny shit, you told it all your problems and it spoke it's opinions to you. All we ever did was tell it to fuck off.

 

[Yusaku]

UT2k4 with text-to-speech is useful, but you need to edit the alias list in the user.ini file. I can't stand hearing it say "GOOD GAME!" for 5 minutes after every match, and it'll also say "number sign" for # and "greater than / lesser than" with <>, so I have it ignore those.

I wish there was a way you could tell it to ignore words that are larger than 10 characters or something, because it sure is clever when some douchebag says "SDFLSKJERE#REYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!"

Even worse is if someone types 302830482304820348203 it'll actually say "Eight gazillion two gajillion 2 trillion ...."

EDIT: TI-84 with speech synthesizer represent. "ONWARD AND UPWARD!"

 

[Uncle Dukey]

UT2004 text to speech can sound relatively nice if you have the ATT Speech Engine installed. It's still victim to people who type in long strings of random garbage or numbers though.

 

[Templar Wizard]

whats the best txt to speech program available at the moment?

 

[Kon Tiki]

UT2k4 with text-to-speech is useful, but you need to edit the alias list in the user.ini file. I can't stand hearing it say "GOOD GAME!" for 5 minutes after every match, and it'll also say "number sign" for # and "greater than / lesser than" with <>, so I have it ignore those.

I wish there was a way you could tell it to ignore words that are larger than 10 characters or something, because it sure is clever when some douchebag says "SDFLSKJERE#REYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!"

Even worse is if someone types 302830482304820348203 it'll actually say "Eight gazillion two gajillion 2 trillion ...."

EDIT: TI-84 with speech synthesizer represent. "ONWARD AND UPWARD!"

My favorite is 'Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo" sounds like he/she is drowning. lol