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How Voice Enhances Life Online
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "A Wall Street Journal article looks at the myriad ways, some surprising, that voice is being integrated into websites and other online tools. Usages range from the familiar--multiplayer gaming--to conducting business transactions and long-distance relationships. 'Ten years ago, the first Web sites were like company brochures, says Jeff Pulver, the VoIP pioneer. 'No one ever expected to have the ability to engage a community virtually. But now a lot of services are becoming a part of the Internet experience, including video, email and voice.'" Update: 08/27 00:12 GMT by Z : Corrected the attempt to 'enchant' and 'enhance' in the same word.
More sounds to come from my officemates' computers. Great.
Voice all over the Internet is annoying. I saw a eBay listing recently where the seller had a voice message welcoming you every time the page loaded. The first time was OK every subsequent view was increasingly annoying - and I viewed it every time.
Voice has it's place, and for meetings or tech support it's OK, but in many places it has become the blink tag of the 21st century.
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So how do I add voice to this /. post?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
seriously, it's like half my bandwidth is going to some moronic animated ad or a video ad, and all it makes me want to do is avoid that company forever.
and then throw sound in and I get really miffed.
whoever thought it was a good idea obviously has never watched pop-up videos on MTV2 - the only reason it's funny is they keep popping up and getting in the way and it reminds you of how you hate that kind of thing.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Co-worker: "Run. Cee emm dee dot ee ex ee!"
Me: "FORMAT! See Colon! Yes! Yes!"
> Ten years ago, the first Web sites were like company brochures, says Jeff Pulver, the VoIP pioneer. 'No one ever expected to have the ability to engage a community virtually...
Jeff: "But now a lot of services are becoming a part of the Internet experience, including video, email and voice."
Me: "Aitch-tee-tee-pee colon slash slash. Goat dot cee ex. And be thankful it's only the pumpkin version these days."
1. Enable voice in your Internet application.
2. ???
3. Profit!
"Enchances"? Is that a word?
Trolling is a art,
And are you regularly deleting your cookies that would tell it you've already heard this message? :^)
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Voice definitely enhances Halo 2, anyway.
Is it just me, or does anyone else cringe and immediately close the site when they open a website with a loud obnoxious voice?
"Comedy's a dead art form. Now tragedy, that's funny."
now were gonna need a STFU button on our browsers.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
That'll make it tough for the 10 year old kid roleplaying a uber 60 Troll Warrior. *wimper* "ChaaaarggGGGe!"
I think this is why it's important to form standards and stick to them. A bit like the Prisoner's Dilemma, I suppose, where if one company breaks the standard they could reap greater rewards but when everybody does it everybody is penalized.
Enchances??????
"It's inevitable that everything will migrate" to an Internet-based platform, he says, referring to television and phoning, among other applications.
I think the question is when. For the mass market to catch on to what early adopters have embraced, it's probably going to take an ipod like product that is easy and does it well. I have a feeling it's still a ways off.
// no
Not according to the Microsoft spell checker.
However, Google found 9,910 uses of it!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What utter tripe. No research involved. They're basically trying to hop onto the voip journalistic bandwagon and pretend like they actually have something insightful to say. Guess what, people have been using voice communcation while playing games over the internet for close to 7 years now (Roger Wilco came out in 1999 I believe). Instead of doing something interesting like maybe writing about the history of video game voice com technology, they try and pass it off as if MS and EA are big innovators who came up with the idea.
My buddies and I already use Teamspeak for playing games like WoW.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
one is where I want to view or listen, say an entertainment site.
the second is where the site "forces" me to view/listen to its advt/propaganda and I have no control: this makes it annoying, and brochures are meant to be brochures, not something thrust onto my face when I visit a site.. I would stop going there, or disable such things in my browser, or better still use a text based browser for such sites.
in short: I prefer what I want to see, I want to control my preferences. But then, there is a price, like msn videos have those 30 sec ads you cant skip..
VOIP is something different..
Upon googling for "Enchances" to try to figure out if it was a word, I actually got a number of hits while google also wanted to know if I meant "Enhances" so either some new word has been coined and I missed it or a lot of other people can't spell either.
I hope that web designers don't assume that the sound is on and try to transmit important information via voice because on my computer it is not.
Does HTTP, etc. offer anyway for a web page to check if sound is even on? If not, then sound is only useful for useless background audio.
Personally, I think voice is a horrible one-to-many communication medium because it is intrusive and linear -- its not browsable. It's like all those horrible Flash animations that slow down the user to a 1st grade reading level while you wait for the words to swirl/materialize into place.
Please keep the web self-paced (not designer-paced).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
And are you regularly deleting your cookies that would tell it you've already heard this message? :^)
Not intentionally, but I run Linux and Opera, so who knows how the page interpreted my visits.
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there you go.. another MS conspiracy.. deny the existence when google shows it..
My guess is it'll eventually go the way of flash intros and bgsound tags.
Well, voice is great for provin that Hotqt4u071282 is really a legal chick.
If its only video, voice and email, there's only so much of an "experience" that one can have on the web (at least with the current tools). What about true interactivity - which is what ultimately everyone is trying to achieve? The way I see it, once they had a mechanism to connect several different computers together and had a standard way of data-exchange, we then "built" add-ons to emulate human senses, thinking naively, it would emulate a human "experience"
I strongly believe our tools are dated compared to the technologies available to us. Browsers (the primary tool for trawling through the information available to us), are primal beasts at best - with core emphasis on hyperlinking and hypertext.
If we are to achieve true "interactivity", all tools we use to access the web (including the OS), will have to be restructured to change the way we access it
http://efil.blogspot.com/
since they can't justify it any other way.
sad, very sad.
Commander: I have to go to the bathroom now.
Squadron Leader1: Me too
Squadron Leader2: OMFG! We're under attack you newbs!
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I love VoIP. I get to actually talk to my friends from college while playing video games with them even though we are spread across the country. It let me have long talks with friends from home when they were having problems and I was studying in England.
At the same time, there are so many pre-pubecent Halo brats I've wanted to beat senseless for their talk BS. It can be great, but without controls and ways to boot the obnoxious VoIP can really suck. We've had it for years with text, but hearing 12 year old hellspawn say i pw3d ur 455 sucks that much more.
In games such as WoW alot of the guilds have, ive noticed, started to require voice on guild raids. I do not want to seem like a troll or seem like im poking fun at people, but i really hate it. This is for several reasons. The first being in a game like WoW it ruins the magic. I do not want the lvl 60 warrior im fighting with to sound like a nasiley 18 year old. I want to IMAGINE what they are like irl, based on the style and language that their character uses. Im not a roleplayer, and i can see the convienience of collaboration using voice, but it really does take alot of the "suspension of disbelief" away. Combine that with the fact that its alot harder to ignore people talking about stupid non related shit, than it is to ignore them typing about it.
The other reason is i hate most peoples accents online. thats kind of a personal attack but i'm really not going to take orders from, or have leadership confidence in, some guy who sounds like he lives in his parents basement and starts wheezing when he gets excited.
again, it ruins the ambiance.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Yea I've heard people talking online before and some how I always thought it was a stupid idea. Do I REALLY want to listen to a 12 year old kid going "YOU FAG FAG FAG FAG FAG FAG FAG!" every time I frag him?
I like muppets.
Is it possible to have a voice helpdesk system on my website? a java client would be great for answering a few questions, but, am I still dreamming here? or what are the alternatives?
Since you don't have to worry about spelling, voice is superior to the written word. Enchances?
So does this mean we can finally start yelling at the slashdot editors for their laziness through our microphones?
- Voice chat is used in FPS games.
- Voice chat is used in e.g. Skype (my example) for conferencing and dating.
- Some people even use voice chat in FPS games for business conferences. (wtf?)
- There exist services for phone Internet interaction.
- Google Talk has been released.
- A managing director think Internet phoning will become important.
- A couple got engaged after they were able to talk more via voice chat than they could have been on phones.
- 20% of 20 million gamers use voice chat, +10% from last year, according to Vonex.
Hmm, a strange potpurri of voice related buzz anyway... Most, if not all, of which any respectable nerd should have realized before reading the article.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
ones where, should they use voice, we can use voice and it sounds in our chosen executive's office or boardroom.
...
Hey, two can play at this game
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Okay, I can see a slip of the finger where Windows was typed as "Windowsz", but the "c" isn't anywhere near the "n" or the "h"!
Yeah that stuff has been around for a while. We used Roger Wilco five years ago to play Counter-Strike, and I'm sure it was done long before I found out about it.
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This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along.
I'm sure 90% of the WoW crowd knows all about the infamous battle cry "LEEROYYYY JEEEEEEEEEENKINNNNNNNNS!" over teamspeak.
That video was probably staged, but it was still hilarious.
I think this is a bad idea... sitting at home trying to be inconspicuous browsing the net while the wife is watching TV then all of a sudden... "Welcome to GoatPorn Dot Com.. your interactive Guide to hot.. sexy.. goat action...... !!" Alt F4 ALT F4.. ALT F4 FOR THE LIFE OF GOD!!!!!!!!!
> a lot of services are becoming a part of the Internet experience, including video, email and voice
Email is becomming part of the internet experience? Hooray! I've been wanting to try this cool new technology for a long time...
The unofficial
Just use Linux: the poor audio support prevents you from hearing anything.
I kid! I kid!*
Actually, my Ubuntu box handles audio on websites rather too well for my liking. It's such an unpleasant surprise to be greeted with some obnoxious sound effect or gratingly overcompressed voice that I sometimes pine for the days of incomplete audio support.
* Well, mostly. Audio support and standardisation could be better.
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
Without voicechat I can pretend I'm wreaking havoc with fellow manly men instead of playing against a bunch of prepubescent nerds. It really slays the old immersion factor when the soldier next to you is squeaking like a mallrat.
enunciation nazis.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
> And be thankful it's only the pumpkin version these days.
"ONLY" the pumpkin? Just what all did he have up there before?
becasue there are just .wav files that can bge replaced. Some opportunity for humor.
In the early mid 90's I changes a friends to say I've got MAIL...Pattern baldness.!"
I think he still uses it.
Also I change another friends so it says "Mail for you, sir."(from monty python's "Holy Grail")
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I am a Marine on Okinawa and let me tell you, voice makes everything a lot more tolerable. I play flight sims and first person shooters online with friends back home. I talk to my wife online. I can see her on my webcam and hear her on my speakers. It just makes it so much more tolerable. It's about a 100 steps away from being in the same room as a person, but it makes it feel 100,000 closer than being on the other side of the planet writing letters back and forth, with the occasional phone call in the middle...
"Hi! Welcome to our online store. I'm Jim, your sales rep. We're having a sale today on generic Viagra. Would you like to order 100 capsules for only $249.95? Um? Oh, surely you want to improve your sex life. Um? How can you pass up this one-time offer at this amazingly low price. Um? I'll throw in free shipping. Um? I'll take that as a yes. We already have your credit card information, and you'll be receiving your product shortly. Have a nice day."
One of the biggest turn offs in any online game is probably being able to hear the players talk. That's one of the first things that gets turned off. My imagination is much better at providing an experience that fits the current situation than anyone else can.
So, to add to the already long list of computer equipment, we need to buy a microphone, so we can verbally brain people over the internet...
A good implementation, such as Fords F150 website, can be a powerful marketing tool, but a bad implementation can be horrible.
When creating the tools in vobbo to embed video blogs in other sites, we went out of our way to create nice placeholders that were silent and bandwidth friendly UNTIL the user decided they were ready to get video and sound. This saves us bandwidth, and saves the user a potential annoyance. As with all things web related, its really the implementation that makes the difference
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
from the quoted article: "Microsoft's Xbox Live, an online gaming service for the console that helped pioneer the online-gaming boom...." I had no idea that the Xbox had been around since teh Roger Wilco days :)
Heh... I sometimes run into this sort of issue, but I have to acknowledge it's my own fault for symlinking my cookies file to /dev/null. But I am still happy enough with my choice not to tell the world about my browsing habits.
That may be true that it improve overall gaming experience for many people who are able to talk to eahc other in game except for hearing impaired gamers like me. It can become more difficult for hearing impaired people to communicate with other people in games such as Battlefield 2. I feel annoyed by people when they ignore me because I can't voice anything to communicate with them. I hope that new features in future games do not single out some gamers.
How exactly is this going to 'enhance' life online for those of us who are deaf?
Not to mention the various problems with voice media - it's not easily searchable, you can't translate it with bablefish, it's low bandwidth, you can't cut and paste an interesting part to forward to someone, etc, etc ad nausum.
I actually like the clear separation of player from character that voice provides.
When I play with the same group for a while, especially across different games, where we know each other to at least some degree as existing beyond any one particular character, I find we tend to naturally talk as players on voice, and as characters in text -- if we want to have our character say something in character, (usually trying and failing to be funny, heh) we'll use the in-game text to have it come from the character's "mouth." It probably works best when the name used in the voice chat is not the same as the character name, something that's probably not practical when in groups with random people.
Back in the day nobody thought of the internet being a virtual reality? That was the big idea from the begining! Didn't this submitter see the lawnmower man. Or even the lawnmower man 2.
If you haven't seen it, this is a hilarious example of voice enabled gaming strategy going horribly, horribly wrong.
In this case, a player being away from keyboard (AFK) long enough to miss all of the strategy.
Leeeeeeeeeeeroy Jenkins!!!!!
Indy Media Watch-Proctologist of the Internet
My gf's phone line is awful; we can talk much more easily on google talk than on the phone, and both of us have our phone right next to our PCs anyway. Also, it allows me to talk to her daughter easily who is five, so although she can type she can't have a conversation with me. For anyone who is blind its got to be a help.
F12->uncheck "enable sound in webpages" and "enable plug-ins"
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
MIT Press has just released a new book on this subject by Clifford Nass and Scott Brave:
"Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and advances the Human-Computer Relationship." ($21.45 at huge online bookstore near you).
It presents research on voice interaction and gives advice about how to do voice without annoying people so much. I've not read it yet but it's on my list.