Does using AI-generated voice for cinematics ruin the game?

[TheIronRaven 2.0]

I tried adding computer-generated voice lines into my cinematics (specifically Google TTS) to give justice and life to the unit speaking, and for the clarity of speech.

The problem is that the ai voice is quite emotionless and sometimes glitchy/robotic, and I know I can't do anything about it. But leaving cinematics voiceless feels so empty (and boring).

Should I use these ai voices or should I just leave the cinematics in subtitles only?

 

[deepstrasz]

I think it's better for the player to imagine the voices instead of using such a program.

 

[MasterBlaster]

A bad voiceover can be really detrimental to the user experience and modern text-to-speech solutions, as decent as they are in some applications, cannot produce a good voiceover, so... I second what has been said above - it's better to have nothing then use TTS.

 

[TheIronRaven 2.0]

Maybe I'm just trying to have some perfectionism and realism too much

Anywaysss thank you for the replies!

 

[N00b-Morti]

I mean, wouldn't be funnier to ask the community to help you voicing the cutscene? We are a lot, I think you'd find people open to voice you whatever you want if you give context, time limit and scripts, or even better if you send the silent clips

 

[Kakerate]

I like the idea, and the concepts been posted here before. This is someone using a Neural Network to synthesize voice lines in the style of a target voice:

[Solved] - Voice files extracted from the game for Voice Cloning (AI-generated new dialogues)

Hello, I currently am doing an experiment of building an expanded universe where existing characters will be involved in excitingly new scenes/dialogues/conversations that the original publisher of the game did not intend. The idea is to create new stories for old characters, where you have...

www.hiveworkshop.com

 

[The_Silent]

I don't think a standardized solution would work, exactly because of how emotionless and robotic it would be.

But if you up for training your own, you can get some pretty convincing results. Does require some data-science knowledge however.

 

[pyf]

[...] Should I use these ai voices or should I just leave the cinematics in subtitles only?

TTS digitized samples labelled as 'Natural Voices' overall sound the best, but their reading engines are mainly designed to impersonate the voice of someone who reads, not the one of a comedian who acts.

The overall quality of a good speech synthesis imho highly depends on the digitized voice samples themselves, as well as on the options to tweak the silence breaks right after any punctuation, for the sentences to flow naturally. For the record, some professional software manages to replicate the subtle breathing sounds of someone while he is also talking, and sometimes some intonations as well.


With this site, you may experiment with the pitch and therefore create 'funny' voices:

Free Text to Speech Online - Free Text Reader - Text to voice

Free Text To Speech online & Text Reader: Reads out loud any text with natural voices. Our Free Text To Voice tool will read your text for you!

www.textfromtospeech.com

Spoiler

This other one has less features, but it allows to compare with Microsoft's Zira (which was designed to sound good on low bandwidth laptop speakers, with a minimum file size for its digitized samples, and was powered by the MS TTS 5.0 engine iirc)

Free Text to Speech Online | Text to Voice Converter

The text to speech (TTS) online is a free reader that allows you to convert your text into a natural-sounding voice.

text-speech.net

Try to experiment first with anything that is available for free online.

 

[pyf]

@TheIronRaven 2.0:

As an example of such commercial software:

AI Voice Generator for Commercial Use - NaturalReader

www.naturalreaders.com

Think audio/music editing, but targeting the editing of digitized voice samples instead