Nintendo expanding dev tools for Wii - fur shading, predictive input, text to speech

[kn]

Kwaad said: Text to speech is killer... but it's nothing special. Text to speech was around in 93. And if you look up some of the 64k demos, some of them have speech as well. Nothing sounds amazing there, besides the mention of Text to Speech. but Like I said, it's nothing new... and what does that matter? you can fit around 50hours of audio in 1gb. 25hours of audio in 500mb. and more like what would be in a game. 5hours of audio in about 100megs. I promise you, Text to Speech will never sound as good as a real voice actor.

Kwaad, You post the most mindless and irrelevant drivel I think I've ever read in forum. You are so narrow-minded it's truly astounding. Do you even know WHY text to speech is attractive? Are you aware of some of the newer text to speech applications like AT&T's natural voice system? Are you capable of thinking about the bigger picture at all? The age of text to speech is irrelevant and talking about how many hours of digitized (voice acting) speech will fit on a given medium is irrelevant. Text to speech is used for entirely different purposes -- i.e. in places where digitized speech just won't cut it. In a linear RPG, for example, where the outcome is already known, digitizing is great as the quality is unbeatable. What about open-ended games where outcomes are based on a number of variables? You can't possibly plan for every outcome and pre-digitize every possible scenario. Synthesis offers so much more in terms of flexibility of game design. As far as voice quality, AT&T, NEOspeech, Cepstral, and a handful of other companies have really pushed the quality of text-to-speech synthesis to unreal levels. Though it's clear that you aren't listening to a human, it's *DAMN CLOSE* at this point. They use a blend of pre-digitized phonics and real-time synthesized sounds to create some amazingly life-like sounds. Try out the AT&T natural voices website samples and you'll see what I mean. All that said, try shutting off your mouth (or fingers) and think before you post. Every now and then you post something that has a small amount of merit so clearly you are able to form a coherent thought and post accordingly.