ReadSpeaker Brings Dynamic Runtime Neural Text-to-Speech to Xbox

ReadSpeaker's runtime neural text-to-speech (TTS) plugin for Unity and Unreal Engine now supports the Xbox platform, enabling developers to embed artificial intelligence-driven runtime TTS voices into any game.

The neural voices for gaming are powered by ReadSpeaker's Deep Neural Network (DNN) TTS engine, which allows neural TTS to run as a stand-alone solution locally on the device for in-game narration, audio cues, dynamic non-player character conversations, and more.

On top of the ready-to-use plugin, if game developers prefer to work in an engine other than Unity or Unreal, ReadSpeaker can provide the same high-performance neural voice capability for other custom game engines through the ReadSpeaker speechEngine SDK. Developers can also add custom synthetic voices based on a voice actor or narrator and produce humanlike speech that expresses a range of emotions, including joy, sadness, and anger.

The Game Engine plugin can generate dynamic, runtime neural speech synthesis in more than 30 languages, including Japanese, U.S. and U.K. English, Mexican and European Spanish, Canadian and European French, German, Italian, Dutch, and Korean.

"Integrating ReadSpeaker's text-to-speech plugin took around 20 minutes and automatically gave a voice to each line of dialogue created within my character engine. There was a lot of nuancing to get the right tone, timing, and intonation and then settings for turning on and off, etc., but essentially Acolyte went from a text-only experience to a fully-voiced game with almost infinite lines of VO in less than half an hour," said Jamin Smith, director and lead designer at Superstring, in a statement.