If statistics and charts are your thing then you’ll love this site which provides a roundup of everything MMOG from a metrics viewpoint. Any business wondering whether there’s a market in virtual worlds need only spend a few minutes looking at the graphs to get a pretty clear answer…
Text-to-speech: Cepstral’s CEO speaks
February 14, 2008 by 2 Comments
Last week, text-to-speech company Cepstral announced they’d formed a partnership with virtual world IMVU to supply text-to-speech capability.
Text-to-speech has huge potential in the virtual world context and is a feature Second Life users have been wishing for. We caught up with Cepstral’s CEO, Craig Campbell, to get a little more detail:
Lowell: What was the impetus for the Cassiopeian / Cepstral partnership?
Craig: Cepstral has a great deal of experience in the traditional Text-to-Speech marketplace, such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) units. You know, the systems that allow you to call in to your bank and check the balance in your checking account, that sort of thing. However, one of Cepstral’s strengths has been our ability to create lots of interesting voices, not just the same old “your account balance is….” type of voice. We realized that fast-growing consumer web applications might benefit from Text-to-Speech (TTS) if it were simple to use and the voices had personality, such as the ones we’ve created.
IMVU interested us as a very popular Virtual World. Furthermore, they have an established digital goods marketplace. We wanted to enable an application within IMVU, and Cassiopeian is one of the most popular developers in IMVU. Her products are very professional and have a great reputation among IMVU users. When we approached Cassiopeian, they were very interested in adding voice capabilities to IMVU avatars, and have been a pleasure to work with.
Lowell: Is there any plans for providing the same technology in other virtual worlds like Second Life?
Craig: We’re definitely evaluating where to deploy the technology next. We’re looking at other virtual worlds, as well as other online environments. For example, we’re testing a Facebook application – VoicePoke – that allows users to send interesting messages to each other. Through a mash-up with Google’s translation service, the widget can even speak the message in different languages. We think this creative approach to using speech in web applications has a lot of room to grow; be it real-time surrogate voices for virtual worlds, messaging on social networks, or media shifting activities such as converting blogs and web text to a mobile, eyes-free audio format.
Our tagline is – “VoiceForge, We Make the Internet Talk™†– I share this to point out that we are not application developers, but rather the heart of speech on the Internet. We offer a free API that any virtual world or developer can incorporate. Our Software as a Service (SaaS) model means that developers needn’t ramp any hardware or bandwidth or linguistic knowledge in order to quickly embed a large-scale TTS feature inside their applications.
Lowell: Linden Lab have stated they’re working on the ability for people to morph their voices on the fly – will Cepstral always be focused on text-to-speech or do you see opportunities in live voice morphing?
Craig: Voice morphing technology will be an option that some users will use, as an alternative to using their real world voice in chat. But if you look at why people don’t like using their real world voice, there are four reasons: it suspends the fantasy notion of the character, for anonymity, for gender bending, and for non-native English speakers who may be able to type better than they can speak. We think that Cepstral’s Text-to-Speech solves those issues better than voice morphing. A user with voice morphing still hears their own voice, reducing the fantasy of their avatar; the user can often still be identified; a male voice with a higher pitch is not a female voice; and voice morphing does nothing for non-native speakers.
Of course, traditional Text-to-Speech doesn’t solve those problems, since most vendors offer one or two male and female voices. Cepstral’s differentiator is that we offer over 30 voices today, and we’re adding more. And those voices each have a distinct sound and personality. There’s a male Texan voice, a female British voice, and female African voice, a male Brooklyn voice, even a voice called “Damien” that sounds demonic. The user can select the voice that they want for their avatar, much like they select the clothes for their avatar – to match their avatar’s personality.
Lowell: What further developments in text-to-speech do you see occurring in coming years?
Craig: Cepstral is focusing on adding new voices, to give users more options. We have many new voices in the pipeline and foresee hundreds if not thousands of unique voices in the future. We have an alpha version of a tool that allows users to create their own custom voices called the VoiceBankâ„¢. And we’ll continue to improve the quality of the voices so that they sound even more natural.
What are your thoughts? Text-to-speech really appeals to me – is it something you’d use over voice morphing or standard voice chat?
Latest Second Life service metrics posted
February 12, 2008 by Leave a Comment
It’s all here on the Linden blog. There’s now a full set of data for 2007 performance including until end of January 2008:
It’s fair to say things are still far from pretty on the stability side. Still more than one in five Second Life sessions end in either a viewer or region crash although there’s been a marginal improvement in frame-rates.
How’s your stability been in recent weeks?
Games, KFC buckets, and chorus girls.
February 5, 2008 by 1 Comment
The latest instalment in Bix Ashbourne’s journey as a new Second Life resident:
Occasionally, I hear Second Life referred to as a “game”.
Don’t quite know what to make of that.
Certainly, in some dimensions, it qualifies; there’s killer graphics, it’s run from a computer, and requires some hand-eye coordination. Especially during sex….imagine, in real life, having to multitask during intercourse the way you do in Second Life; hours and hours of material for sitcom writers in that one. Every episode has a botched orgasm…cue laugh track; humorous, quizzical dismayed look in three…two…one….NOW! But there’s no score (unless you define ‘score’ as nailing that unrealistically-tall hottie), no battle plan, no goal (unless you define ‘goal’ as nailing that unrealistically-tall hottie). No coaches. No scorekeeper (unless you define ‘scorekeeper’ as one pissed-off, unrealistically-tall hottie).
By way of illustration, that last point helps define the transition that SL is potentially foisting upon humans. Those of us old enough to remember when you could give your finger a free ride on the telephone dial (part of a device that had a CORD, for God’s sake, forcing you to remain centralized and focus on your conversation), or experienced the first wave of vector-graphic video games in parlors (‘BattleZone’, anyone? I’ll whip your ass…), can only sometimes look on in bewilderment as some gum-popping teen risks turning her thumb into a torch from the blazing speed of text-messaging her LOLZ to a girlfriend.
The interface between humans and machine has become more densely-packed, offering a rich tapestry of clusterfuck. In SL, a numbing array of information is presented when you first arrive, and it takes you quite some time to filter out what’s important, and what is data fodder. And you can usually only do this by diving in and using it. You prioritise, acclimate, and proceed, with only keystrokes to convey the enormous amount of processing your brain is doing, navigating its way through a maze of digital commands, visual input, and emotion. Oh, and don’t forget the words. Talk about getting your shit together and your ducks in a row.
A discussion with an older friend of mine brought up talking points that were not at all unexpected; “shutting out the outside world”, “distancing yourself”, “tuning out reality”, and a whole litany of similar observations. While the talking points were no surprise, what WAS a surprise was that I found myself playing defense. Finding this strategy was natural, really. Who among us ISN’T tired of reading about one group of brown-skinned people blowing up another group of brown-skinned people in the Middle East every goddamned day? Who among us ISN’T tired of reading about school/mall/drive-by shootings? Of tales of economic woe?
Of governmental iniquities? Of Britney Spears? In a world where the comic section is just about our only relief from this dogpile–and even that gets broached from time-to-time by excellent strips such as ‘Doonesbury’.
Second Life gives you a chance to breathe, with opportunities to actually DO something about the flaming prick that suddenly ensconced you in a large bucket of KFC. (Granted, no-one’s ever tried that stunt on me in RL, but when they do–and some dumbass will–I’ll be ready. You betcha.)
You can’t die. You can’t drown. You can’t be harmed by falling off of tall buildings, or by being hit by a car. Yet, I – and I suspect many others, as well – scrupulously avoid letting these things happen. Why? Why would we worry about it, when we don’t have to? I have a theory (what a surprise); As I said before, SL is like a giant, well-funded ‘do-over’, where you get to work on RL situations in a beta test environment. A place to exercise common sense without your efforts getting too terribly shat on. As a bonus, on the flip side you get to test what you WOULD do if you had some amazing powers, such as flying, or teleporting. “Here’s a gift, see what you do with it”. Given the power in RL, I would STILL not teleport myself into an NBA cheerleading locker room, or a Las Vegas cabaret dressing room, or the set of a porn flick (which I hear is rather unremarkable, anyway).
In many ways, SL is no different than RL. You have good people, bad people, innocent people, knowing-yet-silent people, and people who have very little idea why they’re there. If anything, the interface somehow allows these qualities to surface a little faster and a little more clearly…something we could use in RL in a big, big way.
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