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> In all of its public spaces in the metaverse, you can walk around and listen in on conversations if you want to, but if you’re socially awkward it’s going to
by dvirsky 4y ago
> In all of its public spaces in the metaverse, you can walk around and listen in on conversations if you want to, but if you’re socially awkward it’s going to suck for you.
That's true, but another thing that to me is a huge blocker in that sense, is simply having an accent. When I'm writing in chat rooms my English is fluent and I can just fit right in. But I'm really awkward going into a conversation with a foreign accent in the metaverse.
Even though my accent is not strong at all, and I live in the US and have no problem interacting with people f2f or on the phone/Zoom all day, something about it in the metaverse just makes me feel too self conscious about it. It's weird, it's the only space in which I feel like that, it could just be me I suppose.
- falcolas 4y agoI've always thought that VR chat rooms absolutely need is voice changers. And not just pitch sliders, but "speech-to-text-to-speech" style options too. There's no reason you should be able to change your appearance but not your voice. Accents aside, imagine how much more comfortable people with "traditional" women's voices would end up being.
- dvirsky 4y agoI know that there are some pretty low quality real time voice changers that can do stuff like this, I wonder if high quality models that can fix accent etc can operate in real time these days.
- crooked-v 4y agoVoicemod (https://www.voicemod.net https://www.voicemod.net) can do some of that, by way of the "virtual microphone" kind of method. It's got the standard old-school voice adjustments you're probably used to, but also the speech-to-text-to-speech style with a limited set of 'AI' voices, plus various layered effects you can toggle on and off (e.g. "spooky cave").
- Uehreka 4y agoSome of this may be a side effect of the fact that many apps built on WebRTC audio seem to opt for ultracheap audio codecs like G.722[1]. While I haven't been able to completely validate that this is the case, I have noticed that some platforms (like Clubhouse at least through early spring 2021) have truly atrocious audio quality, to the point that everyone sounds like they were talking on a landline phone (which is what codecs like G.722 were designed for). When you cut the bitrate on an audio signal, it can hurt the signal-to-noise ratio, causing small differences in speech (like a normally subtle accent) to become a larger impediment to being understood. I'll admit, I'm deep in speculation territory here, but this seems plausible. I will note for the record that this doesn't necessarily apply to larger and more established apps like Zoom and Google Meet. They're definitely compressing the heck out of your audio, but they at least have the decency to use more modern codecs like MP3. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Formats/Audio_codecs#g.722_64_kbps_7_khz_audio_coding https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Formats/A...