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Vivox Feature - GDC 2007 - Page 2 of 2

Monty Sharma, VP of Product Management and Marketing / Founder of Vivox, stated that he was encouraging devs to treat voice fonts as a “design area.” “There are about 8 million points of variance [in the human voice],” he stated, intimating that a very finite range of those sounds is something you can stand to listen to throughout a four hour play session. The idea is that a developer creates the “base transform set” for a racial voice, perhaps by an analysis of a voice actor's performance using bleeding-edge technologies, and then allows a player to modify that voice slightly by altering physical characteristics during character creation.

This leads to a question we felt dirty for asking: can you “gender bend” a voice for players who want to play an avatar of a gender different than their own? The answer seems to be: partially, since the cadence of speech and word choice for males and females is often very different. From a technical standpoint, female to male seems to work very well (this was demonstrated for us using pre-recorded samples), but male to female is tricky. The female voice utilizes a greater range of frequencies than does the male, and “injecting” frequencies leads to a more processed, mechanical sound.

The technology continues to advance, however, and (to rapidly change the subject) one of the more exciting areas of advancement is in speech recognition and what Seaver called a “scrolling transcript.” This is exciting both for players (miss what the gangleader just said? scroll up!) and for moderators and GMs (checking a text log to investigate a harassment complaint is infinitely easier than wending through an audio log). There are numerous business applications as well – my job (for one) would be much easier if i were presented with a transcript at the end of every developer conference call.

The folks at Vivox are always a joy to talk to, being dedicated gamers themselves. We're anxious to see what the future holds for voice technology in online gaming.

Return to the GDC 2007 portal.