One of the key reasons that game development is so complicated and nuanced is that, as developers, you have to attempt to think of anything and everything that could affect your game. You have to not only debug the thing to ensure that it runs smoothly and won’t crash as you play, but you also have to think about the players themselves and how their individuality will affect their potential gameplay experiences. For something like the creator studios of Roblox, they need all the help they can get to create meaningful game experiences to bring players to them, and that sometimes means using the dev teams’ many tools to their benefit.
To its credit, the Roblox team has been doing well in improving things on the creator front, including offering all-new tools that can help them create meaningful experiences without having to use their own voices. Yes, we’re talking about text-to-speech abilities. Many often use this to talk with others when they don’t feel comfortable using their own voice or they don’t have a microphone they can use. But in a new blog post, the dev team revealed that a beta for a text-to-speech program has gone live, allowing creators to use the program to help create narration or dialogue across multiple voice options:
“We’re excited to launch the Text-to-Speech API in Beta — enabling you to create professional narration and character dialogue instantly, without managing complex audio production workflows.
The Text-to-Speech API converts text to audio using up to 10 preset voices in English, with customization options like pitch and speed. Whether you’re building step-by-step tutorial guidance or game announcements for your players, this API makes it easy for any creator to add voice content.”
If you think that this is some “random addition” to their toolset, you’d be wrong. The team did a survey of creator studios earlier in the year, and being able to easily put voices into the game was one of the top requests that those polled had.
If you’re now thinking, “Why not hire someone?” That can be both risky and time-consuming. Ask anyone in the voice acting trade, and you’ll hear that sometimes “finding the right voice” is hard, and then affording that voice actor can be even harder, especially if you’re just “making a game for fun.”
Through the ten options the dev team offers, creators can use the text-to-speech program to make them say what they want and then input the game with ease, allowing them to move on to other parts of game development.
