It might be. I like podcasts and audiobooks, consuming these with much more enthusiasm than plain text OR video with subtitles.
On the other hand, I’m not convinced that text to audio is quite ready to replace humans in roles where nuanced dramatic voice acting is important.
Someone brought this up on Discord asking about it. I figured it prudent to repeat what I had to say here as well.
I only got as far as modifying the NATO alphabet to have different ending vowel sounds. I was planning for that to be a diagetic part of a game, where military voice controlled hardware was controlled via menu only and only by this modified NATO alphabet to reduce voice recognition errors, because, in universe, those errors could be deadly.
I had a rough idea of a crashed pilot pinned to their seat via shrapnel and their controls are smashed. A utilitarian drone is strapped into the back, able to be voice controlled. As the pilot, you have to navigate the drone to facilitate your rescue. There would be three voice actors. One acting as both the narrator and the internal thoughts of the protagonist, one of the audio feedback from the drone, and one of the pilot themselves, uses sparingly, say perhaps in the intro where you’d hear their mayday.
If the voice recognition of the game failed to recognize which letter you said, it would diagetically have the drone respond in a very dispassionate, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that” sort of way, and perhaps the narrator voicing the irritated thoughts of the protagonist, or even the pilot’s voice swearing under their breath, which cues the drone to innocently say they can’t hear them, which invites the pilot to react, you get the idea.
Any voice recognition errors on the player’s part gets folded diagetically into the story. That’s as far as I got before life rather rudely intruded and made me drop it like it was hot.
The idea was to borrow how *Lost Pig* used its protagonist to diagetically disguise parser failures as part of the story, as Grunk no understand. I figured if it worked for Grunk, I could make it work for janky voice recognition as well.
Here’s the NATO Alphabet:
I no longer have my altered version, it was lost on my smashed laptop in the crash. I don’t fully recall it either. But it basically altered the words to avoid reusing the same end sound.
So instead of Bravo and Echo and Kilo and Tango… …you had Bravo, Echeye, Kilos, and Tangle.
You had to be careful. You couldn’t just carelessly go with, say Tangor, because you already had Victor, and now you accidentally created a new redundant ending sound. I had it worked out so each had a unique ending syllable, in addition to the already fairly unique beginning syllables. In theory, that should make the spoken words even more distinct and useful for a voice recognition system in war conditions, with static and interference and gunfire and munition explosions going on in the background.
It was this thread that originally got me thinking in this direction. You can probably see that now if you read my posts with this information in mind.
Assuming this idea holds any interest, I was planning a brusque tough all-business female pilot voice, and a somewhat prissy or disaffected drone voice, something that comes across as infinitely and unforgivably placid and calm regardless of the maddening circumstances. I was up on in the air on the narrator voice.
I saw a guy once write a sort of CYOA game on Twitter that you played by following tweet threads. As far as I knew he wasn’t a games guy but just more of a prankster and he did it as a very elaborate joke. I think it was the sort of thing he knocked out in a day, but it was remarkably thorough for a joke.
Oops I just realized I’m responding to a message from some years ago. I still find this forum software a little confusing.
But related to the thread, did anyone play Papa Sangre? It was an audio only game, not exactly IF I guess, but a really interesting experiment. Its methods seem like they could be transferable to IF.
Don’t worry, Necromancing isn’t considered the capital crime here that it is elsewhere. And besides, I necroed it, you just responded to an active thread.
Thanks for sharing that game; I was not familiar with it.
In my research on this I came across this video about the history of spelling alphabets. It’s fascinating and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in such things:
Hi all, I had independently wanted to add a voice mode to Frotz and then found this forum and post. I’ve created a TestFlight beta and alerted the maintainers of the Frotz app codebase so they can incorporate these changes if they work well. I welcome you to test it as well and provide feedback. You can find details here. Hope it’s the kind of thing people were looking for.
-anand
Continuing a conversation from the Golden King Postmortem—I was going to make a new thread called “Audio IF,” but then realized we already had one!
I just went through and added the audio-if tag to a handful of relevant posts on this topic; it’s definitely something people are interested in, but doesn’t seem to have gained a lot of traction in this community specifically. I can only speak for myself, but I prefer the idea of reading IF to listening to it because listening feels more passive than reading to me, and I get restless if I’m just sitting and listening to something. If I’m engaging with an IF work, I want to be able to see the words on the screen so that I can read at my own pace, go back and read a sentence again, pause immediately in the middle of a sentence to pay attention to my dog, etc. So I think it does come down to control for me.
All that said, I liked Demon Game for Sophie and thought that was a very cool use of audio, and not something that could have worked with text only (I know there was a hard-of-hearing mode, but I can’t imagine it hits the same way). So I’m interested in experiments like that, but anything that’s essentially “regular IF work, but audio instead of written text” isn’t going to appeal to me.
I’ve often thought Escape the Gloomer deserved more attention. It does some interesting things, not least being a rare example of a parser game that does away with compass directions entirely.
What does it do instead of compass directions? I sometimes feel that they can be a bit unwieldy but I can’t think of a better system.
Here’s a brief excerpt from the walkthrough, which might give you an idea:
Enter tunnel
Move forward
Touch object on floor
Move backwards
Check inventory
Light torch with fire starting kit
Enter tunnel
Walk forward
Enter open space
Examine open space
Examine spring
