Hi all, I was just curious, I am writing a Mideval FPS/Adventure game and I want to add voice to the characters, but I dont want to have to get a bunch of people to do all the voices, is there any Voice Synth programs out there? Preferrably free ones... Thanks.

Unless your game is either A) populated by cyborgs or B) using "on-the-fly conversations with AI" as a feature, I think cynthesized voics will detract immensely from your game.

Perhaps look in Help Wanted for am inexperienced sound designer who might like to do some dialogue? Beynd that, bite the bullet and do all the voices yourself. I honestly think that would be better:/

I agree with krikkit. (Affordable) voice synthesis is way too artificial to be used by human characters. You can record your own voice and disort it (any semi-decent sound card has some nice effects that will alienate your voice nicely).

I bet you could find people to do it for free if you wanted, especially if your game is going to be free.

just get a good microphone and a few willing friends (a few males, a few females) and you'll be good to go. each of them should be able to give you at least two different character voices... maybe some of them will even have some voice talent and give you some cool results ;)

Quote: Original post by cozman
I bet you could find people to do it for free if you wanted, especially if your game is going to be free.

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http://savage.samods.org

Voice acting guild, of which I host and co-administrate. Check it out, especially the application form or just ask on the forum.

I remember finding a website, I believe it was from AT&T that let you type in a phrase and gives you the option of picking from six different synthesized voices, two american accents, two english accents, and two spanish accents. I think it was clear voice or something, i'm sure you could find it through google. It saved the voice to your hardrive as mp3's this might be a good idea, although they do sound a little digitized i'm sure they will need some audio editing to get them sounding right.

We use the AT&T voices for temporary dialog and they're pretty good but you really wouldn't want to use it for final dialog, there is no emotion, every word is neutral so the sentance doesn't follow the natural intonational flow that you are used to hearing in every day language. Still.... one of the funniest things i've ever heard was when someone used it doing a rap in a Cyrus Hill song.

The technology has come a long way recently but it's still about 5 years off (at least) from being feasable in a production environment. What i think will be an exciting (and slightly worrying) development is when you can analyse your own voice to be used in the speech synthesis. If you could say the 'magic sentence' that contains all the sounds needed for speech reconstruction and then hear your voice in game. I say 'worrying' because when that technology becomes available you could create soundbites of anyone saying anything you want.... just imagine the political implications alone. In a few years i personally think this will become a BIG issue, just imagine that you can't trust ANYTHING you hear...

Another idea could be that instead of being called "player one" or some game character name the game would actually speak your name because all the dialog is synthesised. That would be pretty cool.... also there would be no limit on the amount of speech in a game...

R