By Mitch Rice
Introduction
The gaming industry is highly dynamic and more open to implementing the fruits of the latest technology readily. The industry has registered marked growth owing to the Coronavirus pandemic, reaching a market share of $155.9 billion, according to Statista.
The World Economic Forum pegs this revenue to be three and four times higher than the box office and music industry figures, respectively.
Surprisingly, the gaming industry is leveraging the power of text to speech in ways that aren’t just creative but altogether genius. In addition to making the character voices sound almost human and emotionally convincing, the text-to-speech generators of today are adding cost-effectiveness to game development today in more than one way.
Let’s look at how game developers utilize TTS in gaming universes.
Using TTS For Game Character Dialogues
All big-league game developers like Ubisoft and Nintendo have hired voice actors to deliver the dialogue for all the characters in their games at some point. A good example is the Prince of Persia game series by Ubisoft, where the character of Kaileena was voiced by the famous Hollywood actress Monica Bellucci.
Today, however, game developers seek to bring down development costs by leveraging TTS to emulate character voices. TTS today comes equipped with neural technologies and AI modules to make it sound more humanlike and emotive – making this technology a potentially good alternative to hiring actual voice actors.
Production cost economy can be streamlined using text to speech generators, while they also provide the following benefits:
- Prototyping character dialogue is easier with text-to-speech generators as the dialogue can be changed quickly to see how it impacts the scenes. This saves the company the time, effort, and resources required for recording scripts again and again
- Polyglot TTS modules equip the game developers to quickly enhance the gaming experience by offering dialogue in multiple languages without hiring new voice actors or translators to create subtitles for various languages
- Time savings in game development
Game Interactions Using TTS
In a new trend, game developers are improving game accessibility and navigation convenience by embedding voice instructions into the navigation and gameplay.
This new mode of interacting with a game is rapidly replacing the traditional forms of text and graphics-based guides on the screen. The players no longer need to be “looking” at the screen to understand how to play it – a text-to-speech generator can easily narrate the rules and walkthroughs.
Furthermore, in-game instructions for trial runs or game training can also be augmented with TTS-based speech to help the players learn the gameplay.
The best use of TTS so far in games is adding emotive, expressive narrations of the story instead of having the players read this information on the screen.
Wrapping Up
TTS is set to revolutionize the traditional gaming industry with highly interactive experiences and, possibly, voice-based controls in the near future.
For example, if you wish to quit the game and save your progress, a TTS-based narrator would “ask” you if you want to save your game, and you could respond (like you would with Siri, Alexa, or Cortana) with a voice command.
Text-to-speech generators are truly rejigging the gaming industry in great ways.
Data and information are provided for informational purposes only, and are not intended for investment or other purposes.
