Forum Discussion
Voice Input In Gaming
Vocal Communication
I am a hardcore believer in the need for voice communication in gaming. Voice acting had revolutionized all gaming, and though there were MANY who thought that it's unnecessary, overdone, doesn't add anything, takes away from the story, ect... it's hard to find any new great games that don't have voice acting. Ever since I could first here the characters in the story speak to me I have wanted to speak to them, not just as an observer of their actions, but as a participate in their lives. I wanted to be there fighting with them, getting to know them, joking and laughing with them. Now you're thinking, ok we need to have great advances in AI before you can hope to see that, wait another decade or three. I do hope to get that full realization sooner than 30 years, but it's wait and see. However, there are aspects of this that CAN be implemented. Which can further lead to those advancements. The following are my proposals
What We Can Work On Now
1.) In a conversation you could be given a choice of script and be able to speak the line you so feel inclined when the line is spoken the game would select the line that sounded most like what you said.
2.) In battle have voice activated abilities. Just like it sounds.
3.) Commanding your allies or Creatures. Of course complex commands are out of the question right now, but simple commands like "*insert ally's name here* attack the center goblin" or "Everyone attack" or "Heal me" and have associated actions that line up with those commands.
4.) To Be able to speak a sentence and the NPCs can pick up "Keywords" to respond. This has been done in many games for decades, just not with voice.
What One Hopes To Have In The Future
5.) Recording your name. Often you can create a name for your characters, but in voice acting they can't be spoken. I would propose voice modifications. Where when you record your name it's analyzed and the characters in that game add it to their vocabulary modifying your recording to match their voice.
6.) Having a natural conversation "In character" this would require so much information and "if:then" commands currently that I don't think we actually have a conceivable way of achieving at the moment.
Your Input
If you have any comments or other ways to include voice to add to an immersive VR experience please reply. I look forward to hearing from you all.
I am a hardcore believer in the need for voice communication in gaming. Voice acting had revolutionized all gaming, and though there were MANY who thought that it's unnecessary, overdone, doesn't add anything, takes away from the story, ect... it's hard to find any new great games that don't have voice acting. Ever since I could first here the characters in the story speak to me I have wanted to speak to them, not just as an observer of their actions, but as a participate in their lives. I wanted to be there fighting with them, getting to know them, joking and laughing with them. Now you're thinking, ok we need to have great advances in AI before you can hope to see that, wait another decade or three. I do hope to get that full realization sooner than 30 years, but it's wait and see. However, there are aspects of this that CAN be implemented. Which can further lead to those advancements. The following are my proposals
What We Can Work On Now
1.) In a conversation you could be given a choice of script and be able to speak the line you so feel inclined when the line is spoken the game would select the line that sounded most like what you said.
2.) In battle have voice activated abilities. Just like it sounds.
3.) Commanding your allies or Creatures. Of course complex commands are out of the question right now, but simple commands like "*insert ally's name here* attack the center goblin" or "Everyone attack" or "Heal me" and have associated actions that line up with those commands.
4.) To Be able to speak a sentence and the NPCs can pick up "Keywords" to respond. This has been done in many games for decades, just not with voice.
What One Hopes To Have In The Future
5.) Recording your name. Often you can create a name for your characters, but in voice acting they can't be spoken. I would propose voice modifications. Where when you record your name it's analyzed and the characters in that game add it to their vocabulary modifying your recording to match their voice.
6.) Having a natural conversation "In character" this would require so much information and "if:then" commands currently that I don't think we actually have a conceivable way of achieving at the moment.
Your Input
If you have any comments or other ways to include voice to add to an immersive VR experience please reply. I look forward to hearing from you all.
33 Replies
- I am interested in options 2 & 3. Engaging in a full conversation would likely be a painful experience for me, speech recognition software often has trouble with my Australian accent. Giving short and frequently used commands like "Attack", "Hold Fire", etc could be useful. I could also be used to acknowledge 'radio' message commands, "Roger that", "Affirmative", "Negative" etc.
In the past I have experimented with CMU Sphinx Open Source speech recognition as well as the commercial Dragon Dictate / Dragon NaturallySpeaking products and the Microsoft Speech Recognition. My focus back then was more for robotics and I didn't really spend much time on these as I decided text-to-speech was more achievable at the time.
I see there are a few more options out there now and like everything else, speech recognition has come a long way in the last decade, obviously we want one which is easy to integrate into a game, rather than a stand alone product.
I found this while trying to remember what software I used: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_speech_recognition_software - Sounds very interesting, has any of you tried out the current UDK speech recognizition systems?
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/UE3:OnlineVoiceInterface_%28UDK%29
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/UE3:SpeechRecognition_(UDK) - a lot of folks in the iRacing ranks have been using Glovepie for voice commands for a few years now.
Works pretty well and can automate keystrokes or even a series of keystrokes.
Here's a post from my iRacing blog that talks about it and has a couple useful links.
http://www.bustawrench.com/iracing/iracing-voice-controlled-crew-chief
Cheers,
Shane - Years ago I tried Voice Activated Commands with a Swat 4 profile.
That was awesome, it really ramped up the immersion to give the ai voice commands like "stack up", "bang and clear", "cuff him", etc.
I'm not sure what the current version of VAC is like. "kojack" wrote:
Years ago I tried Voice Activated Commands with a Swat 4 profile.
That was awesome, it really ramped up the immersion to give the ai voice commands like "stack up", "bang and clear", "cuff him", etc.
I'm not sure what the current version of VAC is like.
This is what I'm talking about. It does "ramp up" immersion greatly, even more so now that we have the Rift. This is an exciting time for gaming and I can't wait to see all the fruit it bears.- Here's a video of Swat 4 being played with voice recognition.
"kojack" wrote:
Here's a video of Swat 4 being played with voice recognition.
Dude! That is super freaking amazingly wondrously crazy super flipping awesome-sauce! :o :o :o :o :o :o Mind=Blown!- Yeppers, that is V.A.C. Program Just posted
It is a Voice Activated Commands using a live Microphone to emulate the keyboard commands. Choose whatever you want for the spoken command to get whatever action you can think of. It also makes macro commands function to. 8-)
Neil R - Voice input would be really usefull in virtual reality,an example where it would be useful:magic virtual world,you tell something to cast your spell,or to interact with other player or npc
my dream would be to live in the world of Fairy tail :3 "darklover1997" wrote:
Voice input would be really usefull in virtual reality,an example where it would be useful:magic virtual world,you tell something to cast your spell,or to interact with other player or npc
my dream would be to live in the world of Fairy tail :3
I have only seen the first episode, I've really got to finish watching that series, it was pretty good.
