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Voice: Yes or No?


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Used it on release and it was fun back then.

Now when i go dance it would kill the mood when talking "over" the music.

When im working on things i even put the music off.

Alot people love voice and keep asking to join but i´ve set mine off. Wanna talk to me ? You can have my phonenumber or MSN or Skype or ... no problem.

Monti

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I only use voice occasionally. In particular, to my own way of thinking, it doesn't seem to be "playing fair" and I feel I'm being a little creepy, if I refuse to join in when others in others in the conversation are using voice. When I hear someone voice for the first time, it's interesting to discover whether the voice matches the image that I might have formed of that person. However, using voice has a number of downsides:

(1) I've noticed that some people (I'll pass no comment on their RL sex!) seem to have the ability to talk incessantly without drawing breath and therefore tend to dominate the conversation to the detriment of the conversation as a whole.

(2) Hearing someone's voice can alter considerably your image of that person. I'm not sure that's necessarily a good thing. For example, an avatar may display a sophisticated image and yet the voice is unsophisticated and rough. An illusion is thereby shattered. In my own case, I tend to type in chat as I would speak. However, without the intonation of voice, this can on occasions appear terse and makes me seem distant and aloof. I rather like people having that impression of me. But with voice intonation, my comments are altogther more "gentle" and I lose my aloof image.

(3) At times the chat can come to be dominated by the topic of people's accents and dialects. I know that this can result in you becoming the object of the conversation rather than part of the conversation. It makes me feel self-conscious and a little embarrassed if I become the object of the conversation in this way. In particular, I've noticed an odd phenomenen whereby American women seem behave very strangely when they hear English spoken with a British accent.

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I use voice on occasion but i'm a little shy with it.  It can be a lot of fun if you're out exploring or at a venue with a friend or two, and you're all on voice.  

It's also quite charming to find that others enjoy your accent, and vice versa.  As one who has never liked their own voice, I appreciate that a lot -- or i do when i get over the initial nerves!  :matte-motes-wink-tongue:

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Randall Ahren wrote:

Marigold, I noticed there is voice morphing in the new viewer. You could morph your voice to sound like something you like. Plus if someone asks you for teh sects, you could reply with your voice morphed to sound like a man to frighten them off.

Laughing. I really don't need to morph my voice to "frighten them off".

Seriously, though, I have no use for voice. And I find it stressful to have to listen to voice, on the rare occasion I've ok'd it with someone who prefers not to type. I like to have the chatlog, so I can re-read. It's amazing just how much I miss in the moment.

Also, even if I wanted to use it, voice is not an option for me. I use my brother's computer at my brother's house, and the last thing he wants to hear is my voice droning on and on through the wee small hours of the morning (the walls are not very thick, and it is a small house).

For a while, I did have the pain that you've described. A squishy hand rest and regular breaks from the computer sorted it out for me.

My voice is on this video - which I can't embed, because my brother uses a rude word in it - do you really think anyone wants to listen to that?!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyQcRmEesrU

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Voice: Yes, very selectively.  I was around when voice was rolled out and initially available only at central locations like InfoHubs.  Huge groups of avatars would congregate, turn on voice and blather about nothing.  Those areas were routinely griefed, too.  It was novel and fun.

When I built up my first sim with a friend we would get into IM and voice while we worked.  It was easy to be on opposite ends of the sim and share ideas, etc.

Voice became a hazard when the club where I DJ was open to voice and I would have to try to DJ, listen to the voice chatter, and watch local chat text.  It did not take long for the club owner to shut off voice.

I love to voice with my close friends.  I love to hear them laugh.  But, most of the time, I use text.

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Yes... but can get so laggy then crash... then my puppy barks at strange voice.. then crash.. I love my southern twangish south west texas accsent...but also enjoy typing no bothers there.. keeps the hands busy... and less crashes.. Sooooo if based on a releationship make or break... then break it is... sorry hun.. love you but hate crashes...

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Ian Undercroft wrote:

In particular, I've noticed an odd phenomenen whereby American women seem behave very strangely when they hear English spoken with a British accent.

/me guiltily raises hand

I always type, but I do love listening on occasion...but only to people I know. I can't imagine how annoying hearing it in local chat in a store or club must be. Listening to one voice can be great, but listening to many at the same time would just be confusing to me.

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A very solid NO, from me.

Personally, I do not ever use Voice in SL, and anyone who insists on using it as their primary or sole means of communicating won't be interacting well with me, or with the majority of my friends. Use of Voice is banned on my land, and I won't hang around in places where people insist on using Voice, because I can't hear them or respond to them. So I may as well not be there.

For me, Voice shatters the illusion of our avatars being able to be whatever they want to be. SL allows us total freedom to express our selves, and to take any form that we can imagine. A good text actor can make it extremely believable that their character is a teenaged female fox furry, or a 700 year old dragon, or any manner of creature imaginable. They can even operate multiple and very different avatars in the same room, with no one suspecting they are played by a single person. Voice destroys that illusion, as much as it would destroy a movie for one of the actors to take off all their makeup and cease using their stage-trained voice to appear to have a different accent, and speak and act in the movie as if they were just their mundane selves. Who wants to see "The Hobbit" acted by people with no makeup or special effects? Who enjoys a film or play where the actors constantly "break the fourth wall" and talk out of character to the audience? I certainly don't. I want to accept an avatar for what they present themselves as, and not have it hammered into my head every time that they speak that the pretty wood elf princess I am trying to talk to is actually a teenaged boy with a New York accent.

I play avatars that are all possible genders and many different species. Forcing all of them to speak with a single Human voice destroys that carefully crafted illusion. The "voice morphing" available is nowhere near believable, and is often hard to understand. And Voice can ONLY be used by one logged in avatar at a time. There is absolutely no way, short of using multiple computers and multiple headsets, to have more than one avatar in-world at the same time and all of them using Voice. Yet with text chat, it's quite possible.

I don't come to SL to be my real-world self. None of my avatars are clones of the "real me", and none of them claim to be. I come here to be what I can not be in real life - a fox furry, or a 4-legged dog, or a horse, or a dragon, or a girl with a beautiful, youthful face and body that I could never hope to achieve in this lifetime, no matter how much I diet, use makeup, or apply radical surgical changes. I can recapture my youth, and make it better than reality was. I can play an ancient sorceress, wise with centuries of experience. I can even be a male, and have someone believe that it is true. SL without voice offers an actress (or actor) an unlimited range of roles to play, without the constraints of age, gender, race, or body configuration. Voice brings that all crashing down, where no matter what you try to portray, your real-life voice is stuck to that character.

I have also found Voice in SL incredibly difficult to listen to. And I have tried. I have activated it without a microphone, to try to listen to others using Voice, while trying to type my replies, so I could attend a meeting where the Lindens or client running the meeting insisted on solely using Voice to communicate. Without the visual and auditory cues that we have in real life, it was very confusing determining who was saying what. Sound quality was inconsistent and often unintelligible. And unlike text chat, nothing that is spoken leaves a transcript of what was said. If I have to step aside for a moment, or if I get distracted, or if too much is said at once, there is no way to go back over the chat log to catch up on what I missed. 

I suppose that if your avatar is a carbon copy of your real-life self, Voice may seem wonderful. To me, it's one of the worst "innovations" ever adopted by SL. The only thing worse would be to require all Residents to have a web cam and force their real-life faces to be reflected on the avatar's faces.

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Oh, and two other reasons why I don't use Voice, and in fact normally keep sound turned completely OFF while I am in SL - Background Noise, and being considerate of my house mates. I live in an active household with two other people and at least one barking dog. Other members of my family frequently come in and out of the room where the computer is located. The TV and stereo are in the same room. And my home is under the approach path of the local airport, so we occasionally hear the big jets flying low over the house. Despite all that noise, I can quietly curl up in the corner and text chat to my heart's content. But I can't use Voice with a barking dog and the loud sound track from an Anime movie that my daughter is watching drowning out what I am trying to say.

Voice may be fine if you live alone, with no noisy pets, or if your computer is in a quiet room in the basement away from all other noisy distractions. It is unusable in a busy, noisy household.

And that doesn't even get into the issues of how rude it is to force everyone else in the room to listen to a one-sided conversation. Using Voice while others are in the same room is like having a loud conversation on your cell phone in a busy restaurant. No one else in the room wants to listen to just one side of your conversation that doesn't involve them, nor should they be forced to do so.

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It depends on the situation. I don't hate typing. And in general I prefer talking.

When I teach I prefer voice, because you can react faster to peoples questions.

In a discussion, voice sometimes is easier too, because you never know how text will be taken. You miss non verbal language. With voice you at leat can hear a bit more.

 

Hugs Justum

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justum wrote:

When I teach I prefer voice, because you can react faster to peoples questions.

But when you teach using Voice, your students lose the lecture notes that are automatic and comprehensive if you use Text. Do you record the audio during the class, and transcribe voice transcripts after each class, and send them to your students? Or at least provide a text form of the intended lecture notes?

A class offered only in Voice is one I wouldn't bother going to in SL.

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Voice breaks the spell of SL for me.  It's like going to a movie after I have already read the book.  The characters all sound funny, not using their "real" voices that are in my head. Worse than that, when there is more than one person using voice, I can't always figure out which one is which.  That, plus background noise, static, bad mics, and uneven volume make it hard for my old ears to understand what's going on in a crowd.  I also have non-native English speaking friends that I could never talk with in voice, because the conversation isn't translated.  When we each have typed chat, we can talk slowly, choose our words carefully, and have a transcript to consult when the translation is less than perfect.

I have never used voice myself and I only enable it very reluctantly when I am in a meeting where I won't know what's going on if I can't hear the few people using voice.  I know mercifully few people who like or use voice, so I seem to be in good company.

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I love voicing but I believe there are times when it's appropriate and times when it's not.

I like voicing in private with friends that also like to voice, but stay away from voicing in public most of the time. I do get that most people aren't interested in other people's conversations, plus you don't have to censor yourself when it's private (and you can make fun of people without them hearing... lol).

There are times when I refuse to voice. Like when I'm at a club or seeing a live musician, in which case it just gets in the way of the music. I don't even like DJs voicing over music but that's another issue altogether.

I've tried voicing while being intimate and while it wasn't horrible, I didn't really care for it. It changes the dynamic of how the scene is played out in a way that doesn't really work for me... I won't go into specifics (I know... you're welcome).

Then there are times I refuse not to voice, like when I'm building or shopping or SL hunting with someone else. Doing something where I have to communicate while moving things around, whether it be prims or textures or my camera or myself, I hate having to stop what I'm doing in order to type out what I have to say. I absolutely suck at multitasking.

At the one job I had in SL, working as a managing editor for a magazine, we always used voice. The amount of information we had to discuss would've made it impossibly tedious without it. I wouldn't have wanted it any other way... even though it did lead to the most embarrassing moment I've ever experienced in SL. Again, I won't go into specifics (once in the last forum incarnation was enough... believe me).

...Dres

 

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Doing something where I have to communicate while moving things around, whether it be prims or textures or my camera or myself, I hate having to stop what I'm doing in order to type out what I have to say. I absolutely suck at multitasking.

 

This sounds like my partner.  It can be so much easier for him when we're using voice to communicate in SL, and he finds that  having to stop and type is distracting. 

I much prefer to type, I like the quiet and I'm able to be much more immersed without voice.  I don't mind slowing down and taking the time to think and type, I think that's part of why it can be relaxing for me.  With voice it almost feels like my brain is trying to digest two different worlds, and I prefer to be in one or the other  - not both simultaneously.

So we kind of take turns, sometimes voice, sometimes not.

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Randall Ahren wrote:

You are talented. With that many windows going, I would definitely end up making at least one or two mistakes with entries being made in the wrong window. I probably should get a bigger mouse. Alternatively, I could take a break from SL and go fishing or something. It is summer in the northen hemisphere.

I grew up with text, IRC, IM's STS, chat rooms, so I'm very comfortable with it, and while I'm constantly making typos (programers disease) I almost never mistype chat to the wrong window (although I still seem to hit commands in the wrong one on occasion). The way I avoid it is by simply having only the active one open, so I read and respond, then flip to the next active, then read an respond. tabbed mod helps with that since active tabs are highlighted. believe it or not I only ever learned to type 30wpm at best, usually closer to 20.

I used to get horrible carpal tunnel symptoms when I had a poorly placed keyboard an mouse, even had to wear wrist braces for a while. but I found that once I got used to a higher position for both and added a bean bag wrist rest for the mouse those symptoms went away... a low position on either causes the hand the bend back too far at the wrist, just like when playing piano. having a higher position forces the wrist straighter causing less strain.

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I like voice.  How else can you make a grand fool of yourself at karaoke?  :smileytongue:

And for those who leave their mics open, or eat Cheetos, or yell at their dogs -- you have to be patient and gently explain the hows and whys to them.  Once they understand what they've been doing wrong they'll never do it again, and you'll have another unique voice in the conversation.

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Void Singer wrote:

I almost never mistype chat to the wrong window

If only I were so lucky... lol. Honestly, I don't either, but when I do it's usually a doozie.

Once I was talking to a friend and accidentally posted to the Emerald Viewer group something like, "You think that's gross, when the girl urinates (I used another word though), my little boy runs up and laps it up like he's drinking from a **bleep**ing water fountain." That went over well... lol.

...Dres

Btw: I was talking about my dogs.

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