Ability to use Text to Speech

[Mithril]

I would like to suggest implementing Text to Speech synthesis. This could be used to test dialogs, pieces of information and other that the game intends to have voice actors for. This could help to try out for example dialogs to get a better feeling for how it would sound. This way you can better catch bad dialog earlier that may look good in text, but doesn't work that well when spoken.

There is an online demo here of what I mean:

http://www2.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php

More on MSDN here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms720410(v=vs.85).aspx

and also an open source version here (not as good as Microsoft's version. X11 License, so it should be OK for you to use (No GPL ), but have a look on the license anyway ):
http://festvox.org/festival

[Kai Rosenkranz]

Awesome, thank you for providing helpful links with your suggestion.
We have a "mockup audio" feature on our roadmap which will support fast and easy recording of test VOs, and the idea to also have a text-2-speech feature is pretty cool. I have added it to the feature in our backlog.

-Kai

[Alistair]

Hi Kai

The "mockup audio" feature for voice overs sounds awesome and is exactly what I need for my game development and testing. Do you know whether this feature is under development or whether there is a time-frame for it's implementation?

Cheers
Alistair

[Kai Rosenkranz]

Hi again,

I'm sorry to say so, but there's no release date for that feature right now. Some other features which are more relevant for a broader audience will come first I'm afraid. But I like the idea of supporting mockup audio for conversations and it'll definitely stay up there in our backlog.

Take care,
-Kai

[foxb]

Very useful feature! Would be great to not only get a feel for the conversation but also allowing devs' to get a estimate of time for conversation. Whilst working on a certain AAA project i was designer on we needed to know how much recording time to book at the studio and also give publishers estimates of the total time for all conversations in the game. This feature would absolutely tie into this....

Hope to see it!