Should Unity be Adding Voice Synthesis and Recognition?

News & General Discussion
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Should Unity be Adding Voice Synthesis and Recognition?

With the rise in processing power of mobiles, consoles, PC’s, cloud computing and the impending arrival of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality systems, should game engines be considering voice synthesis and recognition?

I’m showing my age but one of the amazing features of my first Amiga computer was a text to speech API, primitive at the time but a good way to show off the sound chip.

And version 5 has a re-worked sound fx system!!

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I think there are some TTS assets in the Asset Store at the moment if you had a specific project in mind.

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I think that’s something that should fall under the plugin category rather than native. There are voice recognition apis out there.

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Remember, Mono have built-in TTS but for newer version. So if unity upgrade Mono then instantly give us some TTS functionalities.

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I don’t really see any reason for it to be stock. I wouldn’t argue if it was something in the asset store though.

Chances are if it was stock, people probably wouldn’t like it and would want to use another solution anyway.

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Well Unity 5 is going more modular, unused features will not be included in a build.

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hey it sounds liked an asset idea

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Oh really? This is currently only for mobile games that are using Unity Pro AFAIK. This is great if it is included in a console / PC build. Might be only a pro feature like it is now.

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I think I remember something about needing it/finding it useful for web builds now, otherwise you would have to include the entire engine every download.

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I do not think this should become a part of the Unity Core. I think the efforts of the UT staff could be, and are, put to use in much better areas of development. An update to the Mono core would be very nice, and would resolve the TTS not being present; though if I recall correctly speech recognition still isn’t supported in the latest Mono build. As others have said, and I’ll echo, this could be resolved with a plugin.

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Well Unity’s next big focus IS ON AUDIO so I think it makes sense to do such a thing.

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@calmcarrots I hear you when it comes to one of the next big overhauls in Unity being the audio system, but I feel as though TTS and Recognition are niceties, and even further something that may only be used by a small number - compaired to the grand total of Unity’s userbase - of developers.

It is possible on Windows based machines to access their System.Speech namespace, but this is broken the moment you attempt to target another platform. I’m not saying I wouldn’t like to see a nice clean speech package brought into Unity and available for all the platforms, but as there is no standard library in place, I would rather see the efforts for this be put in by one of our dedicated and proven community members than stretch resources even more thin at UT.

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Hmm you might have a point there isn’t a DirectSpeechX or OpenSpeech API, that I am aware of, that Unity could just plug in and set up an interface for and would work with a range of platforms.

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Hey Guys,

Thanks for the input! As this is a kinda specific use case, we would rather spend the effort in making Unity more open to users and package developers to allow these sorts of specific features to be integrated with ease.

Thus there is nothing on the roadmap specific to speech analysis or construction at this stage.

Cheers!

W