AI Voices

[SaSSharp]

So when I was watching game play videos of Arma 3 when I heard the AI's voices I was shocked, they are the same horrendous voice acting found in Arma 2! please someone tell me they have confirmed the adding of smoother more realistic sounding voices.

[SigintArmA]

All I gotta say is... remember, it isn't even in beta phase yet. So what they show isn't close to a finished product. I'm 90% sure the voices will change lol Not to sound like an ass

[St. Jimmy]

Because they haven't made voices yet so they used the same ones as in Arma 2

[maturin]

There is no way to convincingly voice act the literally millions of lines the AI has to say. I hope they don't waste resources on it. Read the subtitles or play MP like everyone else.

[5133p39]

It is perfectly possible to have very nice voices, the recipe is very simple: few changes in dubbing configs, profesional voice actors and lots of time to do lots of work.
But my personal opinion is that the chance of that happening is very slim.
The voices were screaming for help in OFP (but we didn't care because OFP was awesome), then they were horrible in the XBox game, after that they were terrible in Arma 1, not much better in Arma 2, and then again in Arrowhead.
So, obviously the voices are not considered important enough to be made better.

[metalcraze]

It is perfectly possible to have very nice voices, the recipe is very simple: few changes in dubbing configs, profesional voice actors and lots of time to do lots of work.

So how will you say a word that can be used in 20 contexts with universal intonation that will fit everywhere?

It's quite tricky actually. When you start talking you breathe in and breathe out upon ending a sentence or a bit of it so whatever was in between has the same tone. So if you will say Alpha Three Five Six it will come out natural. But it's really tricky when you record Alpha, Three, Five, Six separately.

[5133p39]

Then you say the word 20-ish times

I dont think there are too many different contexts nor intonations.
Basically you can have four contexts:

1.) first word in a sentence
2.) word in the middle of a sentence
3.) last word of a sentence
4.) single word

...and maybe three intonations:

1.) agitated
2.) informative
3.) quiet

There would be a lot of additional sound editing work, but its doable.
Its only a matter of available resources (time/people/money), the question is: would it be worth the resources you put into it? I dont think so, and i dont mean quality-wise.

[Timnos]

please someone tell me they have confirmed the adding of smoother more realistic sounding voices.

Yes, Bohemia have found a new voice actor -

[Archosaurusrev]

The voices are not from voice actors, they're not all from real people.

If you were to make every sound file ever to be used, it'd take a year more to come out and the game would be 5gb more of data.

[metalcraze]

I dont think there are too many different contexts nor intonations.

Numbers are used everywhere in the game. So are unit type names. So are distances.

Basically you can have four contexts:

1.) first word in a sentence
2.) word in the middle of a sentence
3.) last word of a sentence
4.) single word

...and maybe three intonations:

1.) agitated
2.) informative
3.) quiet

In ArmA2 you have 1 intonation and it does not help. Because the word "Three" is recorded separately from "Move", "To that house", "10 O'Clock".

It only seems to you it's doable with magical editing. Falcon 4 also has a similar system where sentences are generated and it also sounds robotic. It's a bigger problem that can't simply be solved by throwing hours into it.

The voices are not from voice actors, they're not all from real people.

They are from real people actually. In ArmA2 one of voice sets for AI was coming from BIS beloved voice actor they put into every game since OFP Elite (the dude voicing main character in Harvest Red and the Delta Force dude in OA). It's too bad they've ditched that voice set in OA.