How To Transform Written To Spoken Words?

Is there a way to transform written Dialogs into spoken Words within a game in realtime?

If possible, is it possible to
pitch,
switch,
stretch,
crunch
that row of sounds
depending the melody of the sentence
(question,
answer,
ironic note),
the voice,
whispering,
shouting,
and other ingredients of the actor's mood?

Possible? Yes.
Hard? No, just requires knowledge of sound manipulation.

Ups, very short answer that!

Under which conditions?

Are there licenses to be paid?

i think pappenheimer is interested in text-to-speech. it still is very hard to make that sound natural.

some text-to-speech solutions support such things but depending on your expectations the results may not be very satisfying. if you don't mind that it sounds a bit robotic you should definitely experiment with it. i think there are plugins already for gamestudio. you can also try out narrator.exe which comes with windows to get an idea what it sounds like.

Rather not. The only game that I have in my mind at the moment, that does something similar is the Flight Simulator series, but even those games use only a very basic text-to-speech engine.

I think it would be such an advantage to an independent production that I can live with a robotic sound, I could add a robotic environment with robotic characters then.

I know the window's narrator, but I fear it has license issues.

Transform text-to-speech plugins for gamestudio? Where?

EDIT:

Let's cut it to pieces:
What about the very basic: text-to-speech?
The other features seem more or less possible with things like the FMOD Wrapper for lite-C?

http://www.peacekeeper.com/3dgs/tts.html

i am not sure if it still works. maybe you have to find a delphi programmer to recompile it. it looks like the microsoft speech api is free for any use.

i think peter rasmussen (the machinima filmmaker who died recently) also used a text-to-speech plugin for some of his movies. he used festival i think.


simple stuff like pitch maybe but you can't easily change the voice to whispering or shouting with sound manipulation. the voice has to be controlled directly by the text-to-speech program. with some programs you can use a simple markup language (similar to html) for controlling the voice.

I thought of changing the voice to whispering or shouting by switching between given voices, maybe using 2 voices at once and mix them per loudness.

Thanks for the links. I will have a look.

I'm astonished that I missed that one by peacekeeper. Great link! Didn't test it, though.

Microsoft SAPI has TTS and is free. Not sure about Vista, but the end user might need a hefty download to enable it. If you don't like the horrible voices that come with it, there are third party ones you can licence. I can't remember where, but I saw one company had an Aussy accent and an Indian accent -very funny.

You can make voices yourself, but it isn't easy. You have to play with the setting and see how they sound.

EDIT> Someone made a TTS plugin for Game Studio using SAPI 5.0. Anyone remember?

Do you mean that one that ventilator mentioned in the beginning of his post?

TTS and the Loquendo voices in particular are great, in some cases hard to distinguish from real human voices.. and i think you can embed things like inflections into the input you give it, but it probably takes a lot of trial and error for each sentence.. i think in a few years it will be much much easier

http://www.loquendo.com/en/demos/demo_emb_tts.htm