TTS / Voice Over Mod/Update?

[xexorian]

TLDR; My suggestion is for boxel ware to look into adding an open source procedural TTS voice overs for all the NPC dialogue to the game in a future update!

  Hey guys, so I wanted to talk about something I was curious of and it's a bit long so I put the TLDR at the top!

  So after doing a bit of research, examples;
https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS
https://github.com/TensorSpeech/TensorflowTTS
https://github.com/DeepHorizons/tts
etc..

  I wanted to hear some of the jokes the NPC's talk about. Or hear when my ships can't find anything to mine. I thought "What about a Procedural TTS Voice Generator" so that when we encounter NPC's and see their chatter we can turn on this option to hear randomized voices for each of the NPC's we encounter? We could also hear feedback from our ships like "Commander, we can't find any asteroids in (X:Y)"  -- you guys could setup a few simple rules, where it wouldn't try to pronounce the ( : ) characters obviously, it would just say the name of the sector on voice like "Frontier of Destiny Gamma" so there would be a difference between the error/dialogue.. and the text feedback so maybe a few small updates to be done there. But, overall, I think an implementation for TTS using something procedural on one of these open source github projects might actually work and fit nicely into how the rest of the game is procedural. Although I didn't dive into these personally, as I don't have the time to sort through and find ones that can be randomized or have support for such a thing, I'm sure one exists, or someone could make a feature request on one of the current github projects!

  A positive is we'd get to hear all your teams jokes that the NPC's chit chat about in the background -- and of course, all of this should just be an option so people can turn it on or off, or even randomized their own captain's voices perhaps. Another positive is how much more immersion or personality to the game it could add if your team checks into this and likes what you find I'm sure we would too! Also, if your team took the time to tweak how the TTS is randomized you could set it up for masculine and feminine voices, and then just like tap a button somewhere to open a window where a player can randomized their voice patterns and have them play some sample chat speech on playback, then like a save button to save the voice you got (with a seed and stuff too, like how we can customized our ships! -- I think it would be cool if we could share seeds of our favorite procedural voices!!) 

Just a thought, I was searching the forums to see if any Text to Speech things were mentioned and then I saw people talking about having voiceovers for the NPC's and thought hey we could do both of those with some of the latest advancements in AI voice software it should be relatively straight forward to figure out and implement, and also, I think those TTS programs are really light weight for how powerful they are. Maybe a few hundred megabytes, but that's about the extent of what I know about them.

..thanks for reading my thoughts!
X
 

[MoreChainguns!]

I was thinking that instead of an AI trying to pronounce a system name, the game basically gave you a prompt to say it, recorded that, and then just changed your voice into an AI's; that way, systems would be pronounced the way that the player wished.