Random_Taffer on 1/2/2023 at 19:38

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Wow that's pretty great!
The Garrett voice is missing some personality, but it's pretty damn close. The others are all great though!

vfig on 13/2/2023 at 03:31

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i avoided posting in your other duplicate threads about this—why spoil your fun? but now youve come and put it on my doorstep, as it were, i feel i have to finally respond:

no thanks.

a creative human work is important: as a thing in itself; as a component of the growth of a person's own skills; and as a vital necessity for sustaining communities, of both creators and audiences.

the designed purpose of these ai tech startups to destroy all of that, to devalue creative labour by mass-producing an ersatz copy. when you thoughtlessly adopt their tools, you are declaring that you also have no respect for the value of the work. we are here as a community making creative works, missions, that are confections of level design work, 3d modelling work, 2d texture work, music and sound design work, and voice acting work. proposing an automatic mechanical substitute to replace even one of those parts displays not only a deep disrespect for the work that goes into each of them, but also a profound ignorance of how the creative aspects of all of those parts interoperate together to produce a great mission; they're not isolated components that you can pull out and plug something else of vaguely the right shape in.

imitating Garretts voice perfectly was never the point of having voice acting in a mission. sure, its great when a voice actor can do a natural-sounding imitation of one of the original voices; it helps with a sense of continuity of the character. but that continuity is a bonus; its far more important that your voice actor understands the character, and the context of the lines, and produces a performance that fits into the entire creative structure that youre assembling when making a mission. take, for example, Yandros's Benny: his voice sounds very little like Stephen Russell's Benny; but Yandros knows the character well and produces a lively and entertaining performance that is Benny—just, if youd like a metaphor, a different incarnation of Benny than in the original games.

lastly, not because its the most important factor, but the least: please listen to voice acting more. maybe try doing some voice acting yourself, even just as a temporary placeholder recording in a mission, to understand what goes into it. it is clear from your praise of the samples you posted that you have not developed a good ear for performance. the samples do not sound at all like Garrett, except insofar as the distribution of frequencies approximates the timbre of his voice. they mostly sound like a decent text to speech algorithm reading text: like a very bored voice actor churning out lines without understanding any context or having any interest in the output. i hope thats not the kind of performance anyone here actually wants in their missions.

R Soul on 13/2/2023 at 19:44

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I also prefer to have humans doing the voice acting. I'll use a speech generator for placeholder lines while the building is in progess, as it makes it easier for me to change the script as I see fit. Once I'm happy with that (usually after beta testing has started) I'll then ask for humans to do their thing.

I can, however, sympathise when someone wants a minor bit of speech to go with a regular AI that will act as normal from that point, but even so, we can usually find someone who's close enough, and if not, a different voice can lead to a different approach being taken by the author, which can benefit the creative process.

Soul Tear on 14/2/2023 at 13:07

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How long until the AI can create fan missions?:D

vfig on 14/2/2023 at 15:10

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i disagree even with this, though not because of ai specifically:

you should try to record your own scratch recordings for all voicework in your mission. it helps your brain to engage with it as speech and not written word, and you will discover by doing this places where your wording feels unnatural, or where another characters response doesnt flow right, and similar problems. so you come out of the process with both the scratch recordings ready for beta use, and knowledge of how to polish your dialog for the final draft.

it doesnt take much time or effort either: you dont have to care about levels much, or noise reduction, or silence trimming, a scratch recording can have bad audio quality. and you dont have to try to do a great performance to benefit from this effect, just do a performance; even if your scratch recording ends up being a bad performance that you definitely dont want, you can just take notes on that but let the scratch stay, for efficiency; try not to do retakes unless e.g. a coughing fit prevents you getting the whole line out. you can barrel through Record, Save, Record, Save and get scratch lines done super fast while still getting the now-i-know-how-to-polish-the-writing-better benefits.

this effect is a good example of what you lose out on by throwing the task over to text to speech, or “ai”. your own brain is already an excellent intelligence that improves every time you engage it with something. thats a fantastic ability that you should try to benefit from whenever you can.