I’m trying my hand at creating a little videogame. Nothing special, it’s very simple, but it’s giving me the occasion to experiment with stuff I’ve never done before. Graphics! Art! User interaction! And now, sound!
I’m thinking of putting in a few voice samples, saying things like “Level up!”, “Congratulations!” and so on in a robotic voice - something like a cheap cartoon from the 90s.
I reckon I have two ways of getting them. Option One, find a software or a web site that generates the right samples using a speech synthesis engine. There are a few applications and web sites that generate speech, but I couldn’t find anything that directly generates something that sounds robotic.
So I move on to Option Two: I record samples in my own voice and then process it to make it sound robotic. And here’s the problem: I don’t know how. I’d really appreciate suggestions.
A vocorder is a device or software to alter speech. The one I have* has settings for robot, ghost and cylon. I’d recommend the vocorder software I have except for two things- I can’t remember where I left it AND if you want to record your altered voice, you have to pay and register the software.
I tried the web page you suggested, arseNal, and it’s not bad a speech synthetizer, and it does sound robotic in the sense of sounding stilted and artificial; the “Croak” voice setting is actually not that bad as a robot voice, but for this particular game I was looking for something like a cartoon’s stereotypical robot voice - how to describe it? Metallic? Reverberating?
Let me use an example - the infamous All Your Base Are Belong To Us video. In the first minute or so there’s the famous dialogue, and it’s all synthetic voices, but you can hear the difference between the bad guy’s voice, which is the kind of voice I’m looking for, and the voices of the human characters, also synthetic but not that robotic.
Of course I could process the samples generated using the codewelt web page, with the right application.
That is just a speech synth, not a vocoder. I wouldn’t bother using a vocoder as it is not necessarily easy to make sure the words are understood and is a little more involved than using a speech synth.
Download the trial version of FL Studio as it has a speech synth which could easily replicate the kind of dialogue. As it is a trial version you won’t be able to save projects (this doesn’t matter though as each bit of speech will still save as an instrument), but you can still export. It really isn’t worth spending any money for the very straight forward thing you want to do.
I’m sure there’s other speech synths you can use, but the one in FL Studio will definitely do the job.