[MUD-Dev] online voice communication

[Sasha Hart]

[Dave Trump]

> It's fairly easy using 80's technology to change voice into
> phonetic text and back.  Text flies accross the 'net, and you
> would avoid the problem you mentioned with the hulking warrior
> sounding like a little kid.  Simply running the correct filter for
> whatever character on the client side would allow you to change
> the text into whatever voice type you wanted, male, female, human,
> orc, whatever.

I have lately been very impressed at the enhanced presence real live
voices give to on-screen characters piloted by people.  Today I was
playing Natural Selection & a friendly alien looked at me and said
"I like cookies." He was a dope, but a dope with a real presence,
because he was a dope with a real and nuanced voice.

Even the best TTS I've heard is just understandable. It doesn't
sound good. I can appreciate the technical coolness of getting voice
comms through a straw by compressing it along the broad-strokes
perceptual categories of phonemes, but it is a shortcut to TTS
without the dictionaries.

It would be easier to evaluate the quality of the output of such an
approach if I knew of any software which used it. But (and I'm
really sorry to pooh-pooh a cool idea) the speech in existing
products works great, is reasonable with bandwidth, and does the
job. And it is always possible to use pitch shifts and other effects
on a signal. It isn't even out of line for new computers to do in
software if need be.


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