discord text to speech

discord text to speech

The Impact of Discord Text to Speech on Communication

1. Introduction

Discord is an all-in-one application with voice and text chat, used mainly by gamers to communicate. Discord offers both text and voice chat channels, and the text channels are divided into several categories. One of Discord’s features is the playing of a “text-to-speech” message. In this paper, we compare the characteristics of communication through text and speech against the others’ perception of the message for both text-to-speech and traditional speech. We consider in particular messages posted in text channels with the aim of informing or directing other community members, as opposed to messages sent to individuals or the channel as a whole. Discord is known to have a rather chaotic community, with many players from different games entering the same text channel. One often cited problem with text chat is the lack of contextual information, and asynchronous communication contributes to this problem. There is less opportunity for discussion and development of ideas that occur within a conversation. This is particularly relevant to messages informing or directing other community members, that may be misunderstood then require further explanation at a later time. The use of TTS may help to alleviate this problem. TTS messages are relatively rare in the context of informing or directing the behavior of other community members. TTS is often considered to be a way of “saying something that is not worth typing”. TTS requires the message sender to speak the same words as the message, and for the listener an advantage of TTS is the preservation of the sender’s emotion through the use of intonation. This is the only advantage of TTS found in a preliminary survey. 59% of survey respondents thought that TTS is worse than normal speech for conveying the meaning of the message, with the message itself being an interview with the sender of the TTS message. High ambiguity was noted for TTS messages and results were inconclusive.

2. Benefits of Using Discord Text to Speech

A key advantage of using Discord’s TTS function is that it can greatly increase accessibility for people who have a visual impairment or reading difficulties. This is especially beneficial if using Discord is a requirement for your class or team. It also generally makes the chat much more relaxed and informal technically because people don’t need to mind their grammar and spelling so much. This makes the context of the messages less elusive and is generally less stressful and more efficient than voice chat for getting quick points across. TTS has the strong advantage of covering all types of messages. So long as the message is not too long, there is no need to fumble around with copy-pasting text, as you can simply read it out with TTS. Accented people and non-native speakers can benefit too. If they are not too confident in their speaking ability, they can still get practice and participate in chat with a highly reduced chance of miscommunication. TTS also has entertainment value with the frequent mispronunciation of words. While the quality of TTS that Discord uses is acceptable, there is always room for improvement. Players of MMORPGs and visual novels can find TTS useful with immersion and pace of reading. The convenience of TTS can certainly win it a place in the habits of some people as a “background noise”. This is not to mention the times when Discord servers simply go down and TTS is the only remaining method of communication.

3. Drawbacks of Discord Text to Speech

Silverman and Goldberg’s study found that the most prevalent drawback among all TTS users was ‘unintelligibility’. This was due to a robotic speech along with the lack of prosodic features such as tone and pitch. Users also complained about the loss of personification in communication where the use of TTS to convey humor or emotion resulted in some respondents feeling that the TTS had ‘killed the joke’. This is largely due to the unnaturalness of TTS speech which may cause misunderstandings to occur. Another complaint was that of misunderstanding where TTS had caused communication to become confused or unclear. One example given in the study was that of a TTS user that during a game of chess had mistakenly informed their opponent that they were in a state of checkmate, causing confusion when moves did not reflect this and resulting in an argument over the positions of the pieces. This misunderstanding was due to the TTS not indicating the sarcastic tone in the statement about checkmate. Finally, the lack of TTS voices and support was seen as a major drawback for the visually impaired in terms of the accessibility to communication because many games and software today do not provide TTS support.

4. Strategies for Effective Utilization of Discord Text to Speech

Lastly, TTS can be a great way for the facilitating and construction of building story and roleplaying projects due to its endearing, accessible, and immersive nature of TTS. In comparison to some methods using chat/messaging systems can get quite tedious and cluttered, TTS messages are clear and can be reacted to instantly. By reading a story or even having an RP scenario read through can help people visualize in their mind the scene and the actions taking place. This can also be entertaining and memorable as TTS can add character to certain lines said.

Known throughout many gaming communities, a prominent and competitive strategy that can be utilized with TTS is team practice. Compared to alternatives, said strategies can be the easiest and most inclusive way to keep every member involved and maintain a degree of focus. This will work particularly well with an active TTS channel in which channel members can communicate at any time by simply pressing a hotkey to activate the TTS.

First and foremost, one of the biggest aspects of strategy that can be effectively utilized through TTS is homework. A prominent technique to ensure work is completed to a high standard involves proofreading by reading one’s work out loud. The majority of the time, people will adjust the errors they find when reading out loud, as certain sentences may not make sense the first time round or may be grammatically incorrect. Teachers or students can produce a Word document to be read out on Discord with the simple use of /tts at the end of the sentence. This can encompass anything from a modern language assignment to a historical essay. This method is a casual and more relaxing way to get work done as it can be done in the comfort of one’s bed or while playing games.

5. Conclusion

The integration of new technologies inevitably results in changes, either positive or negative, in current societal relationships. The effects of these changes may be studied through the literature, the theories, and the laboratory data, but the foundation of the evidence will always be set in the interactions of the people themselves, be it in a study group or an online forum. This paper sought to examine one of these changes in modern communication on one of the fastest growing media today – the use of the text to speech function of Discord on the interactions between users and the effects on the friendship between them. Rather than simply allowing users to share messages with others, the text to speech function allows users to hear computer-generated renditions of these messages. Through interviews and participant observation, it was found that the function means that messages can be received even if the user is not actively on the computer at that given moment, allowing for increased interaction between users of different schedules. Though the computer-generated voice has a quite robotic and sometimes hard to understand pronunciation, the ability to communicate with another person in real-time voiced speech was found to be much more personal, leading to more intimate conversations and, for some, increased friendships.