AI Voices for all missions and NPCs.

[eldriyth]

If you ever had the pleasure to try out Ascension WoW; that team has an addon that uses AI voice acting on all of their quests. It's rather decent, too!

 

Imagine if you could make City of Heroes have voice acting on everything. Hey developers, If you really want to make this game a lot better; I would advise looking into this suggestion and make it become a reality.

 

There is something so immersive about having an NPC talk to you instead of just reading text.

Edited November 8, 2023 by eldriyth

[Rudra]

 

 

 

It's been asked about a few times. I'm not saying yes or no to your suggestion, but you may want to read through the linked threads. (They were all on the 1st page of a search for "voice".)

 

(Edit: I'd say there are as many pros as there are cons for voice acting to a game. One of the things I did not enjoy about Champions Online, and I admit there were many things I did not like about it, was the crappy voice acting. And AI isn't exactly known for having a good range of human emotion or projection.)

Edited November 8, 2023 by Rudra

[Saiyajinzoningen]

54 minutes ago, Rudra said:

It's been asked about a few times. I'm not saying yes or no to your suggestion, but you may want to read through the linked threads. (They were all on the 1st page of a search for "voice".)

 

(Edit: I'd say there are as many pros as there are cons for voice acting to a game. One of the things I did not enjoy about Champions Online, and I admit there were many things I did not like about it, was the crappy voice acting. And AI isn't exactly known for having a good range of human emotion or projection.)

 

All strong points Rudra.

But as I grow old 

and my eyes fail me

I'm far more adverse to walls of text.

Don't get me wrong I love the lore

and some of the arcs are downright EPIC

but a little extra immersion wouldn't hurt

especially if you could easily enable/disable it in the options menu

[biostem]

I'm not against it as an option, but given that I can typically read faster than VAs can talk, and I find the current AI voices to sit firmly in the "uncanny valley", I'd rather it not be forced on us.

[Saiyajinzoningen]

13 minutes ago, biostem said:

I'm not against it as an option, but given that I can typically read faster than VAs can talk, and I find the current AI voices to sit firmly in the "uncanny valley", I'd rather it not be forced on us.

 

Hey um, I might be stupid but I just checked and there already exists a voiceover option within COH

So it is already optional, just not implemented

unless that option is for something else.

[biostem]

3 minutes ago, Saiyajinzoningen said:

Hey um, I might be stupid but I just checked and there already exists a voiceover option within COH

So it is already optional, just not implemented

unless that option is for something else.

It's probably for the limited VOs they added with the updated tutorial and a few other places, back when the game was live...

[Rudra]

37 minutes ago, Saiyajinzoningen said:

 

All strong points Rudra.

But as I grow old 

and my eyes fail me

I'm far more adverse to walls of text.

Don't get me wrong I love the lore

and some of the arcs are downright EPIC

but a little extra immersion wouldn't hurt

especially if you could easily enable/disable it in the options menu

Like I said, I am neither in support of nor against the OP. As long as we are not forced to have it, I couldn't care less. (Like with @biostem, I find that I read much faster than any voice overs in any game I play. That gets rather frustrating when I've read the content but still have to wait for the voice over before I can select anything in the appropriate game. So I personally would not use a voice over feature if it was made an option except to see what voices the game has for the voice overs. If others want voice overs? Go for it. I don't care.)

 

The whole point of my 1st post on this thread was to bring the previous threads on this discussion to the author's attention. Sort of a "Heads up. This is what you can expect for responses."

[MHertz]

I used to be a voice actor like you. Then I took an arrow to the knee.

[srmalloy]

1 hour ago, Rudra said:

Like with @biostem, I find that I read much faster than any voice overs in any game I play. That gets rather frustrating when I've read the content but still have to wait for the voice over before I can select anything in the appropriate game.

From my experience with mandated training at work, waiting for the narration to complete before you're allowed to advance to the next section, and even worse, when there are several bullet points that aren't even displayed until the narration gets that far in reading the text, has severely poisoned me for unskippable (or undisableable) voice over; I'm able to read the text four or five times before the narration gets through the text once. Now consider that, with a thousand character slots per server, you're going to be listening to the same VO again and again and again, until it stops being a clever addition and becomes a drag on play, particularly with 'wall-o-text' interactions that you don't bother reading through any more.

[A Cat]

1 hour ago, srmalloy said:

From my experience with mandated training at work, waiting for the narration to complete before you're allowed to advance to the next section, and even worse, when there are several bullet points that aren't even displayed until the narration gets that far in reading the text, has severely poisoned me for unskippable (or undisableable) voice over; I'm able to read the text four or five times before the narration gets through the text once. Now consider that, with a thousand character slots per server, you're going to be listening to the same VO again and again and again, until it stops being a clever addition and becomes a drag on play, particularly with 'wall-o-text' interactions that you don't bother reading through any more.

I know that feel. We have mandatory training that we do online for various certs and safety things and it's horrible torture. Everything should take less than 5 minutes per but it is triple or more time due to the damn videos and voice overs. And don't start talking about disability access in this case. The place is a machine shop making airplane parts. If there are blind people here I just don't want to know, and you better know how to read or some of these things are going to fly funny. 

 

As far as OP's suggestion, I'd be ok with it as an option, or as something for cutscenes. Depends on how good it is though. It is weird and random that the Galaxy City tutorial has a voice over. 

[honoroit]

you could batch submit the entire lot to amazon polly, and it'd nicely assemble you a collection of mp3s, notifying you on the job IDs when it's done.

 

its surprisingly cheap. once upon a time i wrote something that did this on appearance of posted news content, then cdn'd it about so you'd have a little 'listen to this article button' on a news site.

 

so, if the text exists somewhere, you could do it.

 

for voices, theres some 15 default, and if you can render the text as voice markup, it can go past what it can imply from the structure of the text for excitement, whispering and so on.

 

openai just added speech synth to chatgpt, and apparently that sounds very good indeed.

 

variance of voices might be a thing, but when you consider like 15 of the default EN-US ones, and several variants by asking other EN-XX, and even foreign language ones (which can read english but will mangle some pronunciations, as you might imagine, but in an exaggerated manner), there's a decent selection.

 

past this, there's also the voice emulation models... so every npc can talk like omniman from invincible. or you / a volunteer.

 

imagine if I, Figs, were part of your audio experience in CoH!

 

Figs - voiceover hero

[Yomo Kimyata]

Gary Gygax did a voiceover for a DnD online dungeon and I want his awful voice on everything.

[srmalloy]

48 minutes ago, A Cat said:

Everything should take less than 5 minutes per but it is triple or more time due to the damn videos and voice overs. And don't start talking about disability access in this case.

What galls me the most about the 'advance at the speed of narration' segments is that, even if you use the Section 508 tools to get a transcript of the narration (for example, for a deaf individual taking the training), it's still dragging along waiting for the narration to complete before you can advance to the next section, even if you're unable to hear it (not that I have a hearing problem; I was just looking for ways to get around the slow, deliberate drone of the narration).

[kelika2]

I get antsy waiting for the yin tf cutscene to finish sometimes.

[UltraAlt]

1 hour ago, A Cat said:

It is weird and random that the Galaxy City tutorial has a voice over. 

 

I wouldn't say it is random. It was part of a newer wave of content.

I think they were planning on going that way with missions in the future or maybe just an experiment to see how well it was received.

I don't clearly remember what was going on when that was released back-in-the-day, but I'm assume the "Who will die?" stuff was released around the same time. I don't know if any of that has voice-overs or not.

 

I know it was after our loss of our beloved Galaxy City which was a fun alternative to level in.

[srmalloy]

3 minutes ago, UltraAlt said:

I think they were planning on going that way with missions in the future or maybe just an experiment to see how well it was received.

I believe it was part of a series of upgrades they were looking at implementing, including zone revamps like the Atlas Park update and the two instanced outdoor missions in AP using the feature developed for Praetoria, although I believe the latter proved problematic and was shelved.

[Clave Dark 5]

Hard pass from me.  The few times I've heard voices in vidya games (not that I play any, really), their idea of "good voice acting" is like bottom of the barrel Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters.  Like nails on the blackboard of my mind.

[Rudra]

31 minutes ago, UltraAlt said:

"Who will die?" stuff was released around the same time. I don't know if any of that has voice-overs or not.

Nope. Neither the "Who Will Die?" nor the "Pandora's Box" SSAs have any voice overs. The only vocal parts of the game I am aware of is the Galaxy City tutorial.

[biostem]

1 hour ago, honoroit said:

I, Figs

I dunno what's going on with your guy there, but something ain't right with his hands, arm, knee/leg...

[Black Zot]

If I want to hear a shitty, teeth-grinding, ear-grating fake voice, there's a thousand and more youtube channels that run on that garbage.  Not to mention telemarketing, automated checkouts, and even some traffic signals.

 

4 minutes ago, biostem said:

I dunno what's going on with your guy there, but something ain't right with his hands, arm, knee/leg...

 

AI-generated image.  Makes for a nice visual example of the quality (or rather, the complete lack thereof) we could expect from AI voiceovers.

Edited November 9, 2023 by Black Zot

[TheZag]

Current cut scenes are 'filmed' at the speed of your average casual reader.  Even casual reading is several times faster than speaking.  All cut scenes would need to be reworked to be much longer or the voice over would be sped up to chip and dale rescue rangers levels of ear bleed to finish in time of the current scenes.  That,  and that all the effort required to make it happen just so 95% of the playerbase can turn it off after 3 missions but still be stuck with voice over extended cut scenes.

 

[biostem]

Frankly, I'd rather have some of the generic NPC "call-outs" when they've aggro'd on you get a bit of speech added.  These would have to be used sparingly, though, as on a x8 instance it'd quickly turn into a cacophony.

[A Cat]

3 hours ago, srmalloy said:

What galls me the most about the 'advance at the speed of narration' segments is that, even if you use the Section 508 tools to get a transcript of the narration (for example, for a deaf individual taking the training), it's still dragging along waiting for the narration to complete before you can advance to the next section, even if you're unable to hear it (not that I have a hearing problem; I was just looking for ways to get around the slow, deliberate drone of the narration).

Yep. The transcript just opens a separate window with all the words on there for us. The video is unchanged. 

 

2 hours ago, UltraAlt said:

 

I wouldn't say it is random. It was part of a newer wave of content.

I think they were planning on going that way with missions in the future or maybe just an experiment to see how well it was received.

I don't clearly remember what was going on when that was released back-in-the-day, but I'm assume the "Who will die?" stuff was released around the same time. I don't know if any of that has voice-overs or not.

 

I know it was after our loss of our beloved Galaxy City which was a fun alternative to level in.

AFAIK the Galaxy City tutorial is the only thing with a voiceover. I've done a lot of the newer content including Who Will Die and Pandora's Box, and those don't have any voiceover. 

[Greycat]

Ugh. No, no, no and no, thanks. Especially with AI doing them. Just no.

Besides, I already have years of "voices" in my head, having some AI generated, stunted, weird thing would just be ... no.

 

[SwitchFade]

No vote.