3 ways Azure Speech transforms game development with AI
With Azure Cognitive Services for Speech, customers can build voice-enabled apps confidently and quickly with the Speech SDK. We make it easy for customers to transcribe speech to text (STT) with high accuracy, produce natural-sounding text-to-speech (TTS) voices, and translate spoken audio. In the past few years, we have been inspired by the innovations coming out of the gaming industry, specific to AI.
Why AI for gaming? AI in gaming allows for flexible and reactive video game experiences. As technology continues to change and evolve, AI innovation has led to pioneering and tremendous advances in the gaming industry. Here are three popular use cases:
Use Cases for AI Gaming
Game dialogue prototyping with text to speech: Shorten the amount of time and money spent on the product to get the game to market sooner. Designers and producers can rapidly swap lines of dialogue using different emotional voices and listen to variations in real-time to ensure accuracy.
Greater accessibility with transcription, translation, and text to speech: Make gaming more accessible and add functionality through a single interface. Gameplay instructions that make games more accessible to individuals unable to read the text or language. Storylines for visually impaired gamers or younger users that have yet to be taught to read.
Scalable non-playable character voices and interaction with text to speech: Easily produce voice characters that stay on-brand with consistent quality and speaking styles. Game developers can add emotions, accents, nuances, laughter, and other paralinguistic sounds and expressions to game avatars and NPCs (non-playable characters) that can initiate or participate in a conversation in-game.
Featured Customers for AI Gaming
Flight Simulator: Our first-party game developers are using AI for speech to improve end-user experiences. Flight Simulator is the longest-running franchise in Microsoft history, and the latest critically acclaimed release not only builds on that legacy, but it also pushes the boundaries as the most technologically advanced simulator ever made. By adding authentic air traffic controller voices, Flight Simulator added a small-but-powerful way to elevate the Flight Simulator experience. Recording audio to replicate air traffic controllers from every airport on Earth was a huge task—TTS is a great solution that can handle the dynamic content as well as serve the air traffic controller voices as a low-latency, highly available, secure, and scalable solution. Let’s check out a video for the newly released Flight Simulator experience with custom neural voice implemented for real-time air traffic controller voice.
Undead Labs: Undead Labs studio is on a mission to take gaming in bold new directions. They are the makers of the State of Decay franchise and use Azure Neural TTS during game development.
Double Fine: Double Fine is the producer of many popular games, including Psychonauts. They are utilizing our neural TTS to prototype future game projects.
You can check out our use case presentation at Microsoft’s Game Developers Conference 2022 for more details.
Speech Services and Responsible AI
We are excited about the future of Azure Speech with human-like, diverse, and delightful quality under the high-level architecture of XYZ-code AI framework. Our technology advancements are also guided by Microsoft’s Responsible AI process, and our principles of fairness, inclusiveness, reliability and safety, transparency, privacy and security, and accountability. We put these ethical standards into practice through the Office of Responsible AI (ORA)—which sets our rules and governance processes, the AI Ethics and Effects in Engineering and Research (Aether) Committee—which advises our leadership on the challenges and opportunities presented by AI innovations, and Responsible AI Strategy in Engineering (RAISE)—a team that enables the implementation of Microsoft Responsible AI rules across engineering groups.
Get started
Start building new customer experiences with Azure Neural TTS and STT. In addition, the Custom Neural Voice capability enables organizations to create a unique brand voice in multiple languages and styles.
Resources
- Get started with text to speech
- Get started with speech to text
- Get started with Custom Neural Voice
- Get started with speech translation
Source: Azure Blog Feed