Modifying the Computer Voice

[doctorfrog]

I like the possibilities of the computer voice, but I'd like more options. Is it even possible to control its volume? Can you change pitch, modulation, or speed? I could see it becoming more entertaining and useful if I could get it to approximate a sexless whisper.

[Diziet Sma]

I gather that having something that works on all 3 platforms is the challenge here.. but yes, it would be nice to have!

(In the meantime, there are some soundpacks that change replace the built-in voice with different ones. I'm partial to  halsis (HAL's sexy sister) myself. You could see if any of them are to your liking.)

[another_commander]

I like the possibilities of the computer voice, but I'd like more options. Is it even possible to control its volume? Can you change pitch, modulation, or speed? I could see it becoming more entertaining and useful if I could get it to approximate a sexless whisper.

The eSpeak voices used in the Win32 and Linux ports of the game are fully configurable. Generic documentation about what to edit in order to change them can be found here: http://espeak.sourceforge.net/voices.html. In fact, the female voice you hear in Oolite when you set Spoken Messages to On is not one of eSpeak's original voices, it has been edited to be made softer and calmer than its original counterpart. I am certain that it can be improved even further, given time and willingness to experiment with its settings. You can refer to /path/to/Oolite/oolite.app/Resources/espeak-data/voices/!v/f2 for the file that is actually used when invoking the female voice on the game options screen.

[Diziet Sma]

Ooooh.. I learned something new.. a couple of somethings, in fact..

<gears start spinning> hmmm...

[another_commander]

I would also like to note that OXPs like Halsis etc are nice, have usually higher quality voices than the built-in ones, with one huge difference though: The OXP voice packs are set to announce a pre-defined number of messages like "Incoming missile", "Ident system active" etc. and that's it. The built-in messages are text-to-speech products, which means that any string you feed to the game will be spoken. So you will be able to hear the computer saying things like "Ident system locked onto <name of station you'll hit in a second>", announce the planet names visited and so on and so forth. That's quite a big one in my book and that's why I generally prefer the built-in voices to the OXP ones.

[Cody]

The built-in messages are text-to-speech products, which means that any string you feed to the game will be spoken.

<looks up... grins>

[doctorfrog]

Thanks for the resource, thread!

I would also like to note that OXPs like Halsis etc are nice, have usually higher quality voices than the built-in ones, with one huge difference though: The OXP voice packs are set to announce a pre-defined number of messages like "Incoming missile", "Ident system active" etc. and that's it. The built-in messages are text-to-speech products, which means that any string you feed to the game will be spoken. So you will be able to hear the computer saying things like "Ident system locked onto <name of station you'll hit in a second>", announce the planet names visited and so on and so forth. That's quite a big one in my book and that's why I generally prefer the built-in voices to the OXP ones.

You and I think alike in this respect. I'm going to be editing many of the .ogg files with some custom sounds over time to replace their redundancy, once (if) I can get the generated voices to match my preferences.

edit: also I can't tell you how refreshing it is to read something like this: "The sound of some phonemes may be poorly implemented, particularly [r] since I'm English and therefore unable to make a "proper" [r] sound." (http://espeak.sourceforge.net/languages.html)

[doctorfrog]

Poking around a bit with eSpeak, and this looks both doable and a bit of a time sink, but if it isn't too consuming I should be able to get a result I like.

I'm wondering: is there a way to alter the volume of the voice in-game, and would it possible to at tell Oolite to use a different voice? With an OXP, or some way without replacing default files?

[Svengali]

Poking around a bit with eSpeak, and this looks both doable and a bit of a time sink, but if it isn't too consuming I should be able to get a result I like.

I'm wondering: is there a way to alter the volume of the voice in-game, and would it possible to at tell Oolite to use a different voice? With an OXP, or some way without replacing default files?

Funny. I've talked with a_c about using multiple voices a few days ago .-) And I've played a bit with espeakedit. Unfortunately it simply crashes on my box whenever I start to modify something.

I'm going to be editing many of the .ogg files with some custom sounds over time to replace their redundancy, once (if) I can get the generated voices to match my preferences.

Yes, this sounds like a good plan. Unfortunately the developer states

I don't think there's any possibility of eSpeak becoming a "very high quality TTS" or even sounding human :-) But it does attempt to be intelligible, and strangely I actually prefer it for listening to long text passages over the NaturalVoices, Cepstral, and RealSpeak voices which I've tried. I think I find their intonation more distracting than eSpeak's more mechanical rhythm.

Garg. I guess my dream just vanished... (illusions flattering out of the window). How cool would it be if dialogues could be done with more natural sounding voices.

[Diziet Sma]

Garg. I guess my dream just vanished... (illusions flattering out of the window). How cool would it be if dialogues could be done with more natural sounding voices.

If you can't get natural-sounding, going for something that sounds like a voice on a slightly off-frequency sideband radio might be do-able..