Character Voice Personalization

[Drayven.6408]

The idea is simple... The Player's voice will become the Character's voice... How is this implemented? Well, to be honest, I'm sure it'd be an intense undertaking, but the AI exists currently to record and imitate anyone's voice.

[Teratus.2859]

Intense undertaking is probably a massive understatement there lol

I expect this would be a very difficult thing to implement.. not to mention it would restrict the game for those who have issues with speech or can't talk at all.Then there are multiple languages to factor in and broken accents for languages that are not considered.

I just can't see this being a viable option tbh.. specially if it's extremely difficult to do and overall would downgrade the quality of the PC voice acting.

Personally I'd hate for all my characters to have the same voice.. specially if it's my own voice XDI find my own voice strange when I hear it recorded lol

[Ashantara.8731]

I would be content with being able to at least adjust the given voices' pitch per character - that is a must-have IMO.

But my own voice for all of my characters?? :o No, thank you.

[Batel.9206]

I don't really want my incredibly squeaky, grating, ever-shifting voice to be attached to these epic characters. I couldn't take anybody seriously. :tongue:

Besides, my main character is male, and I'm female. I imagine my sylvari would sound pretty strange if he suddenly went from his deeper, accented voice to my obviously feminine, American, helium-filled sawdust tones.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

Let's leave out how we get ahold of written dialogue before we play a new story, take the time to record it, and then play the story. Let's also ignore different genders and races. Let's also ignore the intense undertaking just to make available the sort of software with which ANet has no direct experience supporting, and getting it to update the right files, without bloating the database worse than it already is.

Let's just focus on the stuff the player character says and does throughout the game. Things like, "I didn't know it would pop like that" and "maybe I was the mirage all along" and (boy how I wish anyone could re-record this one) "new land! new land!!". That's a lot of lines of dialogue. What happens if a player gets bored before finishing them all? How long would you expect most people would want to put in to preparing to play the game?

I think it's a fun idea, but the costs are going to far outweigh the benefits.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

Oh, I thought the OP was talking about some program that used your voice pitch/tone/whatever to automatically convert dialogue.I don't think ArenaNet would add such a thing to the game files, though.Also, it would be odd to have every Race and gender with the same voice.

[The Lag.9742]

What about a pitch slider? Something like Bless online, there you pick the character voice and you can lower or heighten the pitch

[Gop.8713]

I think the existing voice actors probably do a significantly better job of delivering the dialogue than I would, bc they are, y'know, actors . . .

[Danikat.8537]

@"Inculpatus cedo.9234" said:Oh, I thought the OP was talking about some program that used your voice pitch/tone/whatever to automatically convert dialogue.I don't think ArenaNet would add such a thing to the game files, though.Also, it would be odd to have every Race and gender with the same voice.

I thought the same. You record yourself saying a bunch of words and then the sound files are hooked up to one of those text-to-speech programs to read the dialogue.

It's possible, and may not be that much work for Anet since they just have to enable the speech program within the game and then the software and the player does the rest. I know some developers will use those programs to make sure the dialogue is working properly and get a rough idea of how it sounds while they're still building a game and the actual voice acting hasn't been recorded yet, so I assume it's not a massive amount of work to do or it wouldn't be worthwhile for a temporary measure.

The big problem I see with it is those programs are good at reading information calmly and clearly, but can't do any kind of intonation or emphasis. Imagine your character being voiced by your satnav, Siri or Alexa. There would be no shock, no anger, no surprise. Just calmly reciting lines as if it's meaningless words.

They also tend to be terrible with unfamiliar words, and there's a lot of those in games. Maybe some of them could be included in the words you actually record, but not all of them and the others would be assembled from recordings of what the software thinks is the right syllables. So you get your character saying "I saw K-as-me-eer fighting a D-jey-een earlier". Sometimes if it has no idea it will literally just spell out the word.

So the benefits are you get to hear your own voice coming from your character. The downside is it's your voice with broken pronunciation and no intonation (or rather the same intonation on everything). I can understand the appeal for people who want their character to look and act like them as presumably you'd like your character to sound like you as well, but I don't think it would actually be enjoyable to play like that.

[derd.6413]

just because a program exsists for it doesn't mean you can just implement it everywhere all willy nilly

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

In Phantasy Star Universe (RIP) we had a VA system. The first thing we had was a voice-pack of sorts. There would be certain sets of dialogue and accents that we could choose from. Then, we had a pitch slider, to change how high and how low pitched it would sound. The end result was... most players just made themselves comically deep or like chipmunks.

I'm not sure a system like this would work for GW2, though. In PSU all the sound you made was from grunts and yells. We didn't have our PCs speak fully VA's lines. There might be dissonance issues, and also I'm not sure putting in a pitch system would bring in new players.

[Tommo Chocolate.5870]

To give you some idea how this could work and what it would sound like, there's a company called Lyrebird that does this - they take recorded voice samples (e.g. from a user) and use them to generate artificial voices for chatbots, audiobooks, text readers, etc. You can listen to some samples on their site. There are (at least) two problems: Firstly, as several people have mentioned, the speech is not very natural and doesn't have much intonation. Even when speaking calmly, to me the ends of the sentences sound unnatural. Secondly, they say they require at least 2 hours of high quality audio recordings of your voice. So if anyone wanted to use this feature, they'd have to have some way to record those (e.g. a very good microphone), and then record themselves speaking for at least 2 hours - so it's a fairly intense undertaking even from the user's end. (Of course this is just one company, but I expect any such system would have similar requirements.)

Personally I wouldn't want to do this anyway - I hear my own voice enough as it is, and I don't like the sound of it when it's recorded. Plus my characters aren't meant to be anything like me. I can see the appeal for people who deliberately create themselves in-game though.

As a stop-gap solution, you can disable player chatter, and just shout things like "I could outrun a centaur!" every time your player character gains swiftness, etc. You can even correct some errors, e.g. by shouting "Come on Fhqwhgads!" "To the limit!" instead of "I will avenge you!" when you use "To the Limit!" This doesn't work for story dialogue outside of Living World Season 2 though.

[Deimos.4263]

@"Tommo Chocolate.5870" said:As a stop-gap solution, you can disable player chatter, and just shout things like "I could outrun a centaur!" every time your player character gains swiftness, etc. You can even correct some errors, e.g. by shouting "Come on Fhqwhgads!" "To the limit!" instead of "I will avenge you!" when you use "To the Limit!" This doesn't work for story dialogue outside of Living World Season 2 though.I just turn the game sound off and shout my lines into the discord channel at every opportunity. I'm sure my guildies appreciate it.

[Strider Pj.2193]

@Deimos.4263 said:

@"Tommo Chocolate.5870" said:As a stop-gap solution, you can disable player chatter, and just shout things like "I could outrun a centaur!" every time your player character gains swiftness, etc. You can even correct some errors, e.g. by shouting

"Come on Fhqwhgads!"

"To the limit!" instead of "I will avenge you!" when you use "To the Limit!" This doesn't work for story dialogue outside of Living World Season 2 though.I just turn the game sound off and shout my lines into the discord channel at every opportunity. I'm sure my guildies appreciate it.

Oh... I REALLY like that.. nice......

[sorudo.9054]

a pitch and tone slider would be tons easier, the simple fact that it's a matter of adjusting the existing files makes it so simple. (it still needs an in-build program to allow this but it's technically simple)