Possible to replace Betty?

[GlassDeviant]

Has anyone ever taken on the challenge of replacing Betty (i.e.: the ship computer voice) with a different voice actor? Is it even possible?

I really dislike the effects applied to her voice to make them sound "computerish" or artificial, heck we had better computer voices in the 1980s ("Your door is ajar" - not sure if it's a jar of jam, or peanut butter). Also, the voice actor has a terrible vocabulary, mispronouncing a lot of words.

[sithneverdiealone]

I really dislike the effects applied to her voice to make them sound "computerish" or artificial, heck we had better computer voices in the 1980s ("Your door is ajar" - not sure if it's a jar of jam, or peanut butter). Also, the voice actor has a terrible vocabulary, mispronouncing a lot of words.

that is part of her charm. also it fits with the lore (mostly) because there's no AI there still essentially running something like 'dragon' to convert text to voice...with all the errors that implies.

[Fenris321]

I never really minded her voice until she started describing the same thing for the millionth time forcing me to mute her.

Also now whenever I read a description of something (for instance when I use the wiki to look up ships or weapons) my internal voice does it in her voice ... I don't try to, it just happens and only for X3 stuff never in other games.

[X2-Illuminatus]

The problem with replacing betty is that all voice recordings (those from betty and other characters) are stored in one file for X3TC, 00144.dat in the mov folder, and an additional second one for X3AP, 00244.dat in the addon\mov folder. To replace betty you would not only need to re-record everything she says, but also replace the old voice recordings with the new ones in the 00x44.dat files. To my knowledge no one has done that yet.

[GlassDeviant]

Sounds like a challenge. And my daughter needs something to do to "earn" her college tuition, etc.

[vukica]

It is possible.

About 6 weeks work for someone who knows EXACTLY what he's doing.
If someone else is doing the recording it would probably take even longer.

You'd need to record everything, mark everything and then enter start frames and duration into the file.

Alternatively, you could only change mandatory stuff like "Entering Sector", sector, ship and station names, incomming missile, jumping... idk.

Maybe use speech synthesis instead of recording the stuff...

[X2-Illuminatus]

And my daughter needs something to do to "earn" her college tuition, etc.

Maybe use speech synthesis instead of recording the stuff...

I know that UniTrader experimented with Text to speech engines for X Rebirth. See this topic for reference. Since the text files for X Rebirth are structured the same as for X3TC/AP, it should be possible to use his scripts for the TTS engine for re-recording the X3TC/AP betty voice too. That would be an approach to automate the recording process. You would still have to recreate the 00144/00244.dat file and adjust the 00044.pck, which links text and voice file(s), though.

[GlassDeviant]

Sound editing is easy, making sure the resulting files actually work with X3 and getting them working in game will be the hard parts, for me. If I can get the motivation up, I'll see what I can come up with.

[UniTrader]

And my daughter needs something to do to "earn" her college tuition, etc.

Maybe use speech synthesis instead of recording the stuff...

I know that UniTrader experimented with Text to speech engines for X Rebirth. See this topic for reference. Since the text files for X Rebirth are structured the same as for X3TC/AP, it should be possible to use his scripts for the TTS engine for re-recording the X3TC/AP betty voice too. That would be an approach to automate the recording process. You would still have to recreate the 00144/00244.dat file and adjust the 00044.pck, which links text and voice file(s), though.

just for info: the Text files for my TTS Approaches are not exactly the Vanilla ones, i have added some Info for the TTS Engines (alternate Text to be spoken, TTS Engine to be used, Parameters to be passed to the TTS Engine) - it does not interfere with the Game since it ignores this additional Info without Errors, but these infos should be used for best results Vanilla Files do also work though ^^