Voiced Play-by-Play and the future of AI in OOTP?

[Irrelevant Dude]

Originally Posted by kq76

Forget AI. Hire one of our streamers. Some of them are really good! Personally, I really like tehsuigi's understated style, but I can see why a lot of people would like DrDynastic's more upbeat style.

Honestly, there are so many more possibilities with AI. Having a few guys doing actual voice work is fine, but it is also very limiting. We're not there yet, but I can envision a game with AI broadcasters who are infinitely customizable based on user preferences. Design your own broadcast team and then listen to them call the games in their unique style. And not just scripted play by play, but they can hold actual conversations like a real broadcast. Are we anywhere close to that with technology that a game like OOTP can take advantage of? Probably not. But I can dream, and in 5-10 years... Who knows? This would be an absolute game changer for the sports simulation genre.

Sent from my Pixel 8 using Tapatalk

[tehsuigi]

Originally Posted by kq76

Forget AI. Hire one of our streamers. Some of them are really good! Personally, I really like tehsuigi's understated style, but I can see why a lot of people would like DrDynastic's more upbeat style.

D'awww shucks. Why not have both of us in a virtual booth? Other games have a PBP and colour guy.

[highandoutside]

I can't wait until an AI like AlphaGo is designed to handle the GM and managerial functions of the CPU teams.

The current OOP AI in the game is fine, but not nearly strong enough to pose a major challenge without house rules.

[dishnet34]

Originally Posted by kq76

Forget AI. Hire one of our streamers. Some of them are really good! Personally, I really like tehsuigi's understated style, but I can see why a lot of people would like DrDynastic's more upbeat style.

As one of the streamers with an amateur broadcast background (pro if you count the Olympic Esports Series last year?), I'd second this.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by Irrelevant Dude

Honestly, there are so many more possibilities with AI. Having a few guys doing actual voice work is fine, but it is also very limiting. We're not there yet, but I can envision a game with AI broadcasters who are infinitely customizable based on user preferences. Design your own broadcast team and then listen to them call the games in their unique style. And not just scripted play by play, but they can hold actual conversations like a real broadcast. Are we anywhere close to that with technology that a game like OOTP can take advantage of? Probably not. But I can dream, and in 5-10 years... Who knows? This would be an absolute game changer for the sports simulation genre.

Sent from my Pixel 8 using Tapatalk

Having a volunteer do the work needed to provide AI with enough data to work with would be an interesting compromise, although a. it’s still nowhere near inexpensive enough to send out to every single user unless OOTPD wanted to jack up the price of the game way, way higher than it is now, and b. even that level has its own ethical and moral issues (what if someone gets the AI to say something gross and posts it online? What steps does that volunteer need to take to ensure their identity will now not be stolen?).

[fredbeene]

i am just glad there is talk of PBP. There is subform i regularly check, but it has been dead for years.
Does it have to be AI at first? No.
Make more robust pbp text features that community can add too. Overlay decent text to voice to start. just to start : )

[fredbeene]

For now, just give me the ability to export the pbp of a game to text file.
just drop in it here
https://www.naturalreaders.com/online/
there are many other plug ins

[OmahaBaseball]

Originally Posted by fredbeene

For now, just give me the ability to export the pbp of a game to text file.
just drop in it here
https://www.naturalreaders.com/online/
there are many other plug ins

Wow, very interesting. Just tried it and was pleasantly surprised.

[dannymac420]

Originally Posted by fredbeene

i am just glad there is talk of PBP. There is subform i regularly check, but it has been dead for years.
Does it have to be AI at first? No.
Make more robust pbp text features that community can add too. Overlay decent text to voice to start. just to start : )

Yeah I’m fine with the in game generated text, it’s pretty dang detailed. I just want the voice to sound more natural. Doesn’t even necessarily need to be AI, just something better than the very dated text to speech.

Hell, they got SpongeBob singing Michael Jackson now, the possibilities are endless with AI lol.

[dewelar]

As I said above, while AI would be good (and, yes, a voice artist would be great), I'm not sure why I can't tell the game to use whatever voice I use for Narrator, or even just the built-in Windows voices (I would even take Microsoft Zira over what's in there now).

[Ktulu]

Actual recorded dialog is completely unfeasible. It would take a ridiculous amount of resources to create a pbp system with recorded dialog. It makes no sense to even consider it.

A text to speech or AI option is just way more feasible. You just have to do two things to make it work better than the current windows implementation. Re-write the short play by play to better fit animations and the pace of play, and add pronunciation options to the names xml files.

[Sweed]

Originally Posted by Ktulu

Actual recorded dialog is completely unfeasible. It would take a ridiculous amount of resources to create a pbp system with recorded dialog. It makes no sense to even consider it.

A text to speech or AI option is just way more feasible. You just have to do two things to make it work better than the current windows implementation. Re-write the short play by play to better fit animations and the pace of play, and add pronunciation options to the names xml files.

The short pbp isn't too far off with it's timing. That or my ears, with years of use, have grown used to it the way it is One thing that made it worse was adding exit velocities to the pbp that gets read out, which adds time to the audio. Sure on occasion a mention of velo would be ok, but it's every play.
Some situations with a lot of text can go on and on and I wish I could just hit enter to cut it off, but for the most part it works fairly well.

I think some edits to the current short pbp could smooth things out a lot, and would be the "easiest lift"** to get the job done. Save the rewrite as an "audio pbp" option while keeping both the current "full" and "short" files we already have. Add some voice options or ability to use other MS voices and I'd think we'd be ok until new tech becomes good enough, and probably more importantly cheap enough, to come up with a new system.

Of course Macs don't have TTS, so no idea what, or if anything can be done until a whole new module could be added?

** Keep in mind this entire line of thought comes from someone that doesn't code. It may not be the "easiest" or easy at all.

[dannymac420]

Originally Posted by fredbeene

For now, just give me the ability to export the pbp of a game to text file.
just drop in it here
https://www.naturalreaders.com/online/
there are many other plug ins

Wow this is amazing! If I could get one of these to read the in game pbp, I would be over the moon. I’m getting used to the in game pbp voice, it’s tolerable, but one of these voices as an option would be a game changer for me!

[RubeBaker]

Originally Posted by Markus Heinsohn

As soon as there is a good AI voice system out there which runs locally on a machine and can be licensed for a fair price, we'll be all over it

Tonight's broadcasting crew consists of Microsoft David, Microsoft Mark, and Microsoft Zira. ;-)

[doors11]

oldtime baseball used curt gowdy and ernie harwell i used to have all the words they said by having a audio file for each word. this was done by making each name and sentence they said broken down. then each pgp they said was edited and used for each pbp line in the .exe file in ootb each line of written pbp has a number i think.you could put together the words using the txt for each line like we did, this is kind of like what nickkeren did using curt and ernie. I don't remember what program we used for spliting the files to get word and name said but i still have the whole files of their voices.

[robedits]

Originally Posted by doors11

oldtime baseball used curt gowdy and ernie harwell i used to have all the words they said by having a audio file for each word. this was done by making each name and sentence they said broken down. then each pgp they said was edited and used for each pbp line in the .exe file in ootb each line of written pbp has a number i think.you could put together the words using the txt for each line like we did, this is kind of like what nickkeren did using curt and ernie. I don't remember what program we used for spliting the files to get word and name said but i still have the whole files of their voices.

APBA Baseball for Windows does (did) a great job of this with their Ernie Harwell PBP. It's still effective so many years later.

[PSUColonel]

Originally Posted by tehsuigi

I would happily offer my services as a voiceover guy (DrDynastic would be a great option too). I think OOTPD could manage something like how NHL 2004 does it with base lines and then have the player names as their own miniature files with limited intonations.

I would offer mine as well. I’m a former broadcaster and have some experience doing baseball games.

[TheChief]

It is against steams terms of service to use any Ai created assets. If Valve discovers Ai was used to create an in game asset Valve will ban and remove the game from Steam.

Several smaller indy games have been banned after it came out they were using Ai artwork assets.

Remember for the Ai to create any works art, voice, writing it is basing it off of what was input to the neural network. So if you uploaded all of Tom Clancy's writing it could probably reproduce something very similar. OF course it would need an editor but it would capture his style. This does not have a legal precedent yet. Is it legal or illegal?

Someone just created an AI George Carlin comedy special and the family had to file to get it suppressed. I believe they did a comedy special with Tom Brady for some reason. Tom Brady had to threatened a lawsuit as well. Some of the audio has been released and it is certainly very freaky.

You could easily play small clips and think it was real if you didnt know Tom Brady personally. Think they created a 1 hour special. I only heard bite size clips and certainly sounded like him in those small clips.

The way I see it working in the future for video games. Is that they would still pay the voice actors as it is a union job but perhaps it would allow Ai likeness rights to appear in the game while also getting paid for it. So the company uploads all the actual recordings from the voice actor and does the Ai thing so if later the game is updated they dont need to call the actor back in the studio to record they just pay whatever the Ai voice part of the contract was.

Like we are paying you for 100,000 recorded words in a studio and likeness rights for 25k words.

[zippykat]

I actually have a background as a minor league play-by-play broadcaster (18 years) and even did the color commentary on a pair of video games 20 + years ago (High Heat Baseball 2002 and 2003 with Dave O'brien doing play-by-play.

Recording it is relatively simple, coding it is obviously more difficult. You will basically have to look through all the ways to describe an action, say a single to center field, and record ten different ways to describe.

Player specific commentary would be possible for major league players, not all, but at least the stars. Now this may have advanced in the last 20 years, but I spent three days all day in a recording studio with a producer just reading line after line and we only did, I think, about 500 lines for the color commentator and maybe just one or two specific player commentary per team. Then you have to code the triggers. I don't know how much memory that takes up, but I know High Heat Baseball in the last two years was limited in the last version we did and we were not able to add much because of memory shortages.

It would be a welcome addition and I hope it can happen.

[novangelus1975]

I am loving OOTP 25. So many quality improvements. I do use the tts function when I play and even as stilted as it is, for me it adds to the immersion.

But let me raise my hand along with others in this thread about the value of a tts announcer. Someone raised the issue that Steam might ban the game if it used artificial voices. I think this is unlikely since this is an accessibility issue for many people and not just another bell or whistle.

I've been impressed with the Chris voice-over at Elevenlabs.
I quickly wrote some play-by-play and the voiceover was excellent.
Check it out at https://1drv.ms/u/s!AsFJVvASHzmOlNES...mNDpQ?e=mDZHNl

Until the day arrives when OOTP has its own announcers, is there a workaround that would allow us in the game to choose MS Voices already on our computer? OOTP always plays the Dave voice even if the Mark voice is the default voice on my computer.