Droid Productions
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Text 2 Speech and AI Voices
🕑 Added 2024-03-10 07:01:55 +0000 UTCI'm now putting the final touches on Love of Magic Book 1's New Game+ mode. What remains now is basically just bug-fixing, with all the content completed.
One of the things I decided to add back in was the Text-2-Speech module; I don't know how commonly it's used, but I do know I got a lot of requests to put it in for Book 2. Since this is the final engine that will be used for all 3 games, I figured I'd best set it up now.
The problem of course is that the current Text2speech systems are pretty terrible. As a quick experiment I decided to look into the new AI systems (11 Labs, specifically) as an alternative.
I put together a quick Python script to automate the process, so it looks like it'd be a doable thing, process-wise. Obviously there's a LOT of text (like 20K/lines or around 1.5M characters), so it's not exactly a cheap process (~300USD). With a little bit of elbow grease it's fully automated, so it would boil down to the PC sitting overnight generating MP3 files and saving them in the correct format (in case you wonder why they've got such weird filenames, these are the unique IDs for each line of text).
So... thoughts? Is it worthwhile spending the time putting together an AI voice-over (hiring humans to voice 20K lines is totally not happening :D)?
Let me know in the comments.
Comments
Droid Productions
Yes, if you grab the NG+ update (Steam beta branch) it's there already. Once I've finished Morningstar's main path the plan is to return to the NG+ game and start adding some additional content.
D G
is this ever going to be added to the steam releases?
Pax
Thanks!
Droid Productions
~100kb/line x 20k lines = 2GB for Book 1.
Pax
I like it. As a curiosity - do you have an estimated file size to add in VO for each of the 3 books? I use external drives, but others may not be able to do this, and the file size could impact usage depending on how much larger each book is.
Droid Productions
Good to know that it's appreciated. The ability to map voices to people got ported over as a feature, and since I'll be remastering Book 2 and 3 in this version of the engine, it'll support it there as well.
Urani
Im one of thous who from time like the VO and i was one of thous that asked Droid to integrade the VO modul from book 1 to book 2 and 3 ads it gave me ads a player a experience with the game and story. I agree with Droid that to higher actors and record there lines can very quickly get very expensive and time consuming. But what i was amazed about the VO in book 1 is that it wasn't one voice for all. But the player could give one voice for Kate and a much different voice for Molly. That made the experience for me much more enjoyable to play even thou ther where/is a bug when multible changes entered and exited a scene that just made it hilarious for me lisen to Thorman with Kate's voice. I appreciate Droid to involve the community in the decision making and can only say you are making a fantastic work of art. Keep up the good work
Jen-Chun Teng
I personally don't use Voice Over, but I'm sure some people would really need it. Thanks again for your dedication for your work and for your audiences.
