I have an idea for a project I want to do: I want to create a mod for a video game which does TTS for all the written dialogue. Problem is, the game I want to do this for has a LOT of dialogue, much of it not spoken out loud, to the point where generating speech for every single line using an Elevenlabs subscription would be enormously expensive.

That's not even accounting for re-dos where the original line doesn't work, just assuming I'm only using the first result it gives me it would still make it completely unaffordable to me.

As I understand it, there are two ways I could accomplish this:

1. I could either take every line of dialogue, create an audio file for it, and then load that in when it appears in-game. Lots of work up-front, but results would be higher-quality, although due to user error I'd likely miss many areas with dialogue. This would also be a lot of data assuming the user needs to install it locally. Streaming the data probably wouldn't be possible with my current setup.
2. I could make an AI transcribe dialogue that appears in real-time, using either a server or the user's local computer to handle the workload. This would be much less work upfront, and while results would be lower-quality I think it would be fine even if the occasional line sounds kind of weird.

I'm still researching if this is even possible on a budget, and I don't have a lot of experience with TTS models. Some of the live transcription models I've seen take around 1-2 seconds for 1-2 lines of dialogue. I think 1 second of delay might be okay, but anything past 2 seconds for short quips is way too much, and I would just consider it unusable at that point.

Of those two options, I'd MUCH rather do option 2, but I straight up have no idea if it's even possible to do it in a timely manner, given current technology.

Also for those wondering about the ethics of this idea, I'd be using generic voices with actors who have consented to being used for AI, I wouldn't be cloning the voices of in-game characters. Ideally I would be able to generate material even relatively close to the level of Elevenlabs. If it sounds bad enough (Amazon Polly sounds pretty bad) I probably wouldn't even want to bother.

Any advice? I'm not finding good solutions and at this point I'll probably have to table this idea until an affordable service comes along.

You can take a look at my profile if you’re curious what I’ve been up to, but long story short I’ve had some opinion-based posts and getting downvoted on many of them, big surprise.

Personally, I actually don’t care very much about getting downvoted. It’s a little frustrating that my posts won’t get more engagement because of said downvotes, but for me this is just a minor annoyance since I honestly just expect everything to get downvotes by default. I’m usually just looking for conversations or information, basically the only reason I ever post anything.

What concerns me is that with the way Reddit is set up, I feel like this system biases basically every post you see that gets any upvotes at all. Being able to essentially attack a person’s account from any of their posts is a feature exclusive to Reddit, no other forum I’ve ever used does that.

Ideally I’d want Reddit set up so that, if someone gets downvoted to hell, they might just leave the post up because people finding it later on Google or whatever might think it’s interesting. The fact that one really bad post could result in a karma bomb on your account probably discourages a lot of people from posting on certain things.

I feel like a ton of people sensor themselves purely because of the karma system. I think deleting a post because you’re embarrassed by the results is perfectly normal and human, but to me Reddit’s system has always felt a little weird because of how much it guides your hand, even if you don’t notice it doing so.

The result is that most of the conversational posts we see are extreme opinions that lack nuance, or feature a distinct lack of disagreeable opinions. This results in many subreddits just feeling like echo chambers, which I’m not into. When I see opinions I disagree with, oftentimes I want to engage with that person to see why they feel that way, I don’t want to just delete them entirely because I disagree or whatever.

There are exceptions like r/unpopularopinions , but besides these niche cases you pretty much have to conform to expectations or you are passively informed that your content is unwelcome and that you shouldn’t exist.

I’m happy I don’t suffer from Reddit-induced anxiety, but I know for certainty a ton of people do for this very reason.

This is purely a hypothetical question, as the devs have made no announcement of any intent to do this. I'm just curious what the community would think since AI tends to be such a divisive topic.

Personally, I consider myself mostly anti-AI, with the exceptions of very specific use cases, and used only as a supplementary tool, with complete legal permission. My mostly negative viewpoint stems from the fact that many are abusing the power that comes with using AI tools, and in many cases it makes the product that they were used on worse than before. Many people involved in AI are also trying to make quick money before the bubble bursts, which leads to bad leadership and bad integration. I like the idea of the technology, but I don't like the lack of regulations and accountability that currently comes with it.

With all that said, I was thinking about practical ways AI might be used in an MMO like ffxiv, and I actually think even as someone who usually opposes AI that I would welcome this addition (with caution, but more on that later).

Much of the ffxiv experience (especially the older parts such as ARR) feel antiquated and lack polish after all this time. The devs have made attempts to streamline parts of it, but even after those changes it's hard find to reasons for the devs to polish older content when the newer content demands so much of their attention.

Older cutscenes especially have many moments where important things are being said, but there is no voice acting. Voice acting in a cutscene is usually a sign that the scene is very important and that the player should pay attention, but this has the side effect of making the player value these voiceless cutscenes less.

(However, you could also make the argument that players can't be expected to retain ALL the information of a given story/expansion/whatever, and by putting voices into specific cutscenes it informs players which scenes they should make an effort to remember in order to retain most of the important information. This is a valid criticism of my idea and honestly I'm not sure where I stand on it yet)

I feel confident in assuming that the reason many sections don't have voice acting is because of financial/logistical reasons, not because of artistic ones. Which is to say, I don't think they intentionally want sections without voice acting because they think it adds more to the game, quite the opposite. But it's a compromise that has to be made because this game is such a large production as-is. Even getting partially voice-acted cutscenes in ffxiv is a lot better than getting none at all, in my opinion.

AI-supplemented voices wouldn't be a perfect solution, but they might be valuable enough to the point where many people felt like it adds significant value to the experience. If all cutscenes and conversations had voice-acting, player retention would be higher, and overall enjoyment would be higher as well. In execution the AI would probably do it's best to duplicate the voices of whatever character is speaking, as well as making an educated guess what a previously voiceless character would sound like.

As great as the idea of more high-quality voice acting can be, I can also acknowledge the potential for negative results. Adding AI voices to the game could potentially devalue *all* cutscenes, because you might find it harder to connect to a character's performance if you think there's a chance it could have been AI generated, which is totally fair. For this reason I would propose either making this feature optional, and/or prefacing a cutscene/convo by telling the player that the audio is AI-generated.

It would take development time and money to integrate as well, but for the sake of the hypothetical I'm ignoring this factor, I'm mostly just pondering the ethics of the idea. I'm also ignoring the complexity that comes from the fact that not everyone plays with English voice acting. Hypothetically you could do this across all supported languages, but that would obviously require more time and money.

I can also acknowledge that doing something like this could potentially have a negative snowball effect, where in the future Square Enix (and companies like them) are more tempted to just generate AI voices instead of hire real voice actors, going forward with future content. I would feel a lot better about this idea if I somehow knew that they wouldn't do this, but realistically if the quality was good enough I think there's a strong chance they would try it and see if they could get away with it.

Did I miss something here? This whole ramble is basically me posing a thought experiment. I'm not 100% on board with this idea, and like I said up front I'm mostly just curious what everyone's thoughts on it would be. I'm open to ideas and concerns, feel free to let me know if I overlooked something or if you have anything to say.

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But in a good way, if that makes any sense.

I just picked up this agent recently on a whim. Everyone knows Neon is fast, but somehow she feels so much faster when you’re the one in control. There’s this huge sense of whiplash when every other agent in the game moves extremely slow in comparison. The difference is like going from a skateboard to a jet ski.

I played some games with her (in normals, I’m not a psycho) and most of my rounds were complete disasters, but not all of them. Grab the Bucky, run straight into 3 people, kill one of them and die. Or run around the whole map, flank the entire enemy team before anyone can turn around. Or just run out and die instantly because they shot bullets into my wall.

I watched some pro vods of Neon players after. Obviously they’re much better than me, but they also play Neon so differently. Everyone expects the “YouTube shorts Neon montage” style of play where you’re just slipping and sliding like crazy, but many of these pros actually take their time with this agent and don’t just rush into everything headfirst. Crazy, I know.

Very fun agent, but it’s also kind of exhausting trying to learn her. I feel like my fundamentals could get worse over time if I focus too much on the movement too. Any Neon fans?

New update that hides every player’s KDA, to prevent toxic players from harassing their team’s bottom fragger

https://suno.com/song/0316b881-9de5-485e-9fd8-eb5ea1ba9a64

I noticed when I play video games that have quiet moments with very quiet ambient sound, my speakers (headphones) will do this weird thing where, lets say we have audio that starts from no sound, becomes louder, then gets quiet again. I won't hear the very beginning and end of those sounds at all, but it'll suddenly click on at some volume above 0, maybe around a 5 out of 100 for example.

I tested my headphones outside of VoiceMeeter and they're fine, this seems to be an issue isolated to VM. Curiously, after testing my headphones separately and then reloading VM banana, the issue is gone, but I'd like to know what's causing this in the first place since this will probably happen again next time I boot up my computer. It's very annoying playing games where audio is very important, like multiplayer shooters, and not being able to hear very quiet noises sometimes.

I’m not a teacher but I’ve heard this opinion from multiple places in the last few years especially. Do we have good data that proves this?

Anecdotally I talk in groups on discord, and I’ve noticed in groups with demographics that skew younger, maybe older teens on average, people HATE reading longer comments. What’s wild is that I’m usually trying really hard to condense what I say and be as deliberate as possible. I can’t even type 3 2-sentence paragraphs without getting a “blud is yapping (skull emoji)“ back

Things definitely didn’t used to be like this. I’ve been around a while now, and I’m seeing “TL;DR” on comments that I’ll make now on posts which take like, 10 seconds at most to read. It legitimately makes me wonder if these people are just taking much longer to read through my messages than I would.

Meanwhile I posted a wall of text to a discord that skews older/more intellectual, and people actually responded properly, even though I thought it might be too long. But I feel like as I age those people are going to start disappearing.

I know that the cliche of the older generation worrying about the future is nothing new, but it seems especially dire right now, no? Is it not worth worrying about when we have quantifiable proof that things are only getting worse?