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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.
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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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.
That's quite a question, if you're blind. I don't think most programs/sites are easily accessible to people with disabilities (I tried a screenreader once, it was awful, but then again, what can substitute vision?). To them, voice has a much more important meaning than to you and to me.
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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).
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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...
Actually voice makes me wish for the device mentioned in the top1 quote on bash.org.
(for those to lazy to go there: I mean the device to stab people in the face over the internet)
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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.
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.