[MUD-Dev2] [Technology] Lend your ears to science!

[Mike Rozak]

Jeffrey Kesselman" wote:
> Are the technologies identified somewhere?
> Id be curious to know who is building the most realistic sounding
> systems and if they are available for development use...

In the test, the voices are anonymous... until the results are made public 
at the beginning of September.

The companies that did best last year were UTSC and IBM. Some of the larger 
companies, like AT&T (which also has a good voice), don't participate 
because the marketing consequences of not doing well on the test are worse 
than the marketing benefits of doing well. If you look through last year's 
papers (http://festvox.org/blizzard/blizzard2008.html) and look for the term 
"mean opinion score" (MOS), you can get an idea which ones did better.

I talked with some of the researchers at last year's conference, and (to use 
a double negative) they didn't seem disinterested in supporting games, BUT 
(a) the current money in high-end TTS is coming from telephony, (b) 
consequently, their technology isn't quite right for games. They can tune 
their technology to be more game friendly (such as including lots of voices 
with personality, as opposed to a couple of very-good, happy-sounding, 
telephone-operator voices), but it's a chicken-and-the-egg issue.

Basically, TTS engines aren't targeted at games because no games use TTS 
(except the one I'm working on). Games don't use TTS because (a) TTS engines 
aren't targeted at games, and (b) (a hyperbolie) contemporary games are 
about killing things - which doesn't really require speech, just grunts. 
Games are about killing things because (a) that's what the current target 
audience who visits game stores wants, (b) gamepads are designed for 
shooting/killing, (c) 3D accelerators are designed for shooting/killing, (d) 
games about killing things make lots of money and therefore attract lots of 
development money, and (e) to create a game about talking (an alternative to 
killing) you need text-to-speech... and current text-to-speech isn't geared 
towards gameplay... so any sensible person decides that it's far 
easier/wiser to make a game about killing things than to explore new 
territory.

Having said that, at least one of the TTS companies (forgot the name... 
they're working with Vivox) has quite a few voices.

I can go into excruciating detail if you want.