Alternative to voice acting

[Ghostwidow]

Its amazing what you can do with simple text to speech software online and a quick free audio editor. I am not interested in voice acting a British female accent, so I came up with a quick easy free alternative.

The setup:

I am creating a campaign for some players, one of which I know is playing a wizard. The scenario is they will have something happen to a town they are in and have to go on a one night adventure to save the town. All the while being followed by an hidden unknown person who will recruit them to a hidden forrest clearing where an elf mage will introduce them to the campaign via voice through a glowing sphere. This is what I will play for them


https://youtu.be/E1vkRJqaWiU

I can add more for various responses they may ask, isn't hard to do. What do you think of this method?

[carrdrivesyou]

Honestly, this method makes sense. It really just depends on how much effort you want to put into things. I did something similar to this a while back, and honestly, I found that prepping altered voice recordings was a bit tedious, and my players ended up asking questions I didn't have answers for. The one's I DID have answers for...half of those went unused. So I guess it boils down to how much prep you want to put in, and how well you know your players. Its a marvel of an idea, but I personally find it tedious and impractical.

[MaxWilson]

Its amazing what you can do with simple text to speech software online and a quick free audio editor. I am not interested in voice acting a British female accent, so I came up with a quick easy free alternative.

The setup:

I am creating a campaign for some players, one of which I know is playing a wizard. The scenario is they will have something happen to a town they are in and have to go on a one night adventure to save the town. All the while being followed by an hidden unknown person who will recruit them to a hidden forrest clearing where an elf mage will introduce them to the campaign via voice through a glowing sphere. This is what I will play for them


https://youtu.be/E1vkRJqaWiU

I can add more for various responses they may ask, isn't hard to do. What do you think of this method?

I think this idea is brilliant. Unfortunately, I can't see the video. But I love the idea and will steal it if I can find a cheap and easy way to generate nice-sounding voices on the fly!

I probably won't steal this idea for all interactions (players would find it distracting to have the DM do much typing during the game), but if I can establish an initial "voice" for the character with voice software, they'll probably find it fine if I answer short questions in my own voice, because they'll "hear" that voice in their heads.

Edit: this seems decent enough. http://ttsdemo.com/

Edit2: following is an example of the kind of scene that I normally hate to use, because nobody wants to watch the DM talk to himself, but that might be fun with voice software if I just keep two tabs open for two different voices and paste pre-written text into them.

Voices generated by http://ttsdemo.com/. For Hag Mother: Catherine, ptich = high. Elf daughter: Bridget.

Hag Mother: There are six ways into the forest. Five of them are guarded, and the last is hidden.

Elf daughter: No, only four are guarded. Trolls ate the centaurs, remember?

Hag Mother: Oh, yes, I had forgotten. If you cross my palm with silver, you may challenge my daughter to single combat. If you can subdue her, I will tell you of the hidden path.

Elf daughter: But be warned, I will not take it easy on you.

Hag Mother: She broke the last one's back.

Elf daughter: Oh and by the way, if you lose, my mother and I get to eat the loser.

As a player I would find this short scene pretty fun, and as a DM I expect it to generate player engagement, whereas doing this in my own voice would be no fun for anyone.

Thanks again for the post!

[DMJosh]

This is a really cool idea. I'd avoid comments or answers to questions that may not come up, and focus on greetings, catch phrases, and talking points you know will come up.

I'm not a huge fan of voice acting prolonged conversations in most cases anyway, so I tend to switch back and forth between voice acting as the character and narrating summaries, ("She goes on to explain that..."). This could definitely give the voice acting pieces more flavor - especially for those characters I envision with voices I don't do very well, such as the female British accent mentioned earlier.

I don't know for sure that I'll use this, but it's definitely worth checking out and considering. Thank you!

[Scripten]

I haven't done this with fantasy NPCs, but when I ran a sci-fi one-shot, I had a number of AIs that needed artificial sounding voices and so used a voice synthesizer to generate a number of phrases so that the players could get a feel for what they were interacting with.

[Ghostwidow]

The video got corrupted somehow, I will see if I can put it back up. What I used was this
https://ttsmp3.com
Then I selected British/English Amy. It sounds the best.

I then downloaded the mp3 and ran it through a free audio editor app where I added a slight echo and some reverb. It sounded really good, was free, and I did all of it on my phone.

[Mutazoia]

It's a good idea, but personally, I don't think it's going to work the way you want it to work. As pointed out above, your players may go off the rails for the conversation and leave you scrambling to cover the lacking dialogue. Unless you are going to use a speech to text converter, plug that into the text to speech converter and try to run that real-time (and hope the whole process doesn't break immersion too much) I would skip it. Just running the software, instead of talking to your players, might be immersion-breaking enough to make your game seem more like a video game than a TTRPG.

You don't have to RP a female voice with an accent, although it would be cool if you could. 99% of the time, just describing the NPC's voice and speech patterns is enough for players to mentally fill in the details themselves.

[Ghostwidow]

This is just to give depth and engage the players with an intro thats not from me. The voice will come from a glowing sphere in the room for a background on the quest. Another NPC will be there to filter questions. However, I can anticipate a few questions they may ask and run that through there as well, but it probably wont be needed.

Here is an.audio sample from the ttsmp3.com website ran through a voice changer app to add a slight echo effect

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKCOmoW0Up4

[Monster Manuel]

Wow.

That ttsmp3.com site is WELL DONE.

I spent about 5 minutes trying to stump it with increasingly unlikely phrases and hard-to-pronounce fantasy names. The results were amazingly well-rendered.

I followed up with a proper, formal British accent saying the phrase "All I wanna do is shoop-de-boop-doop" and it was, I think, the funniest thing I have heard in a while.

Nice find!

[MaxWilson]

Wow.

That ttsmp3.com site is WELL DONE.

I spent about 5 minutes trying to stump it with increasingly unlikely phrases and hard-to-pronounce fantasy names. The results were amazingly well-rendered.

I followed up with a proper, formal British accent saying the phrase "All I wanna do is shoop-de-boop-doop" and it was, I think, the funniest thing I have heard in a while.

Nice find!

I love how it lets you set up a script in advance with multiple voices talking to each other. It's really great.

Be warned that there is a usage limit. If you don't want to run it in the middle of a game session, prerecord or pay for a subscription.

[Renvir]

And here I was thinking I was streets ahead with my popsicle stick glued to a printout of an NPC's face idea. Now if I combined the two...