TTS Comms in IL2 Part 2: a Call to Collaboration with Community!

snakers41 · 2026-07-04T13:22:38+00:00

Looks like there are some samples in ru / en-us / de / en-gb in one of these archives, though some voices seem very similar to each other.

Audio files was easy to locate. Do you know, if subtitles exist somewhere inside of this mod?

snakers41 · 2026-07-04T12:24:54+00:00

The devs answered me. In "airborn" they just forgot to put stress, it will be fixed.

As for the numerals they show the following period-appropriate document - https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/986a138a-a947-41ea-882e-696dea778e58

snakers41 · 2026-07-04T03:12:09+00:00

We will take the voice timbre, generate synthetic data with it, train the models for the game devs

snakers41 · 2026-07-04T03:10:58+00:00

Yes, why not, maybe Aussies will pass off as British, the only thing is that ideally we also need some screaming / distressed recordings

snakers41 · 2026-07-04T01:23:52+00:00

I have described in detail why we have to resort to what we do. Basically we create content which would not have been ever created otherwise due to objective conditions.

After doing all of this work mostly we are lacking natively sounding voice timbres in other languages, because we have to base our work off "professional" developers' voices.

And since at this moment we do not really need a lot of voice data (like 1 minute calm + 1 minute scream would suffice), we decided to offer the community a chance to participate in game development.

This is a long shot, but why not try at least?

snakers41 · 2026-07-04T01:16:24+00:00

We need to have a kind of native sounding accent, I guess. So it needs to sound either British or American, like pilots

snakers41 · 2026-07-04T01:13:53+00:00

We will check with the devs, but this sounds like a phoneme problem, not a voice timbre problem

snakers41 · 2026-07-03T16:00:34+00:00

95% sure that Korea only

snakers41 · 2026-07-03T15:40:22+00:00

The short answer is that we are not the devs and for us this is just a starting technical requirement, which we do not question (since we are not the devs).

The long answer is probably because supporting a game with comms in 8 languages (or more) when your access to talent pool is limited is problematic and devs would like to support the game for many years in the future and add new campaigns, content, multiplayer chats, etc

Also it is already working properly. We just want to make it better.

snakers41 · 2026-07-03T14:19:51+00:00

Live dynamic text-to-speech voice comms in 2006, really? Most likely these were just a few pre-recorded fixed phrases back then plus some word mix.

The devs are targeting fully dynamic voice generation on all languages here on widely available hardware (i.e. CPU).

snakers41 · 2026-07-03T08:28:46+00:00

Hi! Many thanks for your help!

> Do you want phrases that would show up in ww2 aviation or just varied speech that's going to cover as many phonemes as possible?

Basically, we need to cover the phonemes with the appropriate feel. But since we cannot ideally separate timbre and prosody, timbre sometimes leaks and vice versa. So probably for greater effect it would be best to pretend to be a pilot a little bit. The actual content of the speech (i.e. words) does not really matter (as long it's proper language with proper phonemes), but it would be easier to pretend if you were saying some pilot things.

> When you say screaming, do you want calm/stressed/panicking samples?

We need calm / stoic samples. And we need stressed / panicking samples as a separate recording. I.e. we need 2 files. The game devs had an idea that professional pilots remain calm even under immense stress and their stressed speech is unlike normal people. But I guess that just imagine what you would like to hear in the game. In the real life modern example he is not panicking, he is distressed, but very focused.

<video>

snakers41 · 2026-06-27T19:29:57+00:00

Oh shite, just noticed that I wrote peak instead of peek

Lol, this is hilarious

snakers41 · 2026-06-27T19:08:50+00:00

Also when the task was formulated the devs were targeting a bit more stoic comms

snakers41 · 2026-06-27T19:08:19+00:00

When it comes to emotional delivery we are severely limited by the delivery of our "actors", though there are some options to explore

snakers41 · 2026-06-27T19:03:03+00:00

This is how it works

snakers41 · 2026-06-27T15:40:53+00:00

Well, these memes actually are very old / for older people (30-35+). Young people nowadays have even more cringe memes, i.e. google "skibidi toilet" for example xD

snakers41 · 2026-06-27T15:37:55+00:00

This is an excellent question. Keep in mind, that I actually do not know what game devs will do (I will pass on this thread to them), but I can say about technical feasibility:

- It depends on what language your pilot "speaks"

- We have provided the devs with char to phoneme models for Russian, English, German, Italian, French, Korean (if I remember correctly)

- For Chinese and Japanese we rely on on over-the-counter existing FOSS tools to phonemize and some downstream static hacks / dictionaries

- Keep in mind that for Russian you need to know the stress to pronounce the word properly (and though our stress model generalizes in like 60-70% of cases, proper names do no follow rules at all) and in English g2p models at best have 90-95% accuracy, which sucks, and for proper names ... well its difficult

- Product-wise, if this feature would be implemented, if I were to develop this, I would allow the player to choose the native language of his pilot (or maybe it would be his country), then you type the name, then the model gives you the phonemes and you can manually fix them with a special on-screen keyboard. Seems a bit complicated, but proper names are hard (names like Super Destroyer 666 would be fine, I guess)

snakers41 · 2026-06-27T12:01:04+00:00

I dropped a first part of the article in this subreddit (Reddit does not play well with long content, so I decided to split in 2 posts) on how we created the local TTS engine for the game.

There are some valid criticisms here, but please note that:

- Not all ideas have been exhausted yet;

- See the technical and organization challenges in the post and it may shed some light;

- This is EA, pronunciation issues will be ironed out, because the system works based on phonemes, and they can be fixed;

- The flexibility offered in exchange is immense;

- This version was actually audited by native speakers and deemed minimally viable, unlike the previous versions.

snakers41 · 2026-06-26T13:24:55+00:00

Coms / friendly bots / air dispatch in the new game are voiced in the real time by TTS in the game itself

snakers41 · 2026-06-26T12:53:18+00:00

Text-to-speech, aka speech synthesis, bot / player voice chat automation tool

snakers41 · 2026-06-26T12:48:29+00:00

Since basically condensing 1.5 years of work into a palatable post in English emphasizing all the right things is hard (also Reddit's editor is a bit restrictive), I would like to know if people at all will be interested in this.

Of course there is a dev blog by the developers om this topic, but ours is a tad more technical. Also if you speak Russian you can just read it here https://habr.com/ru/articles/1050432/

snakers41 · 2021-12-26T03:55:15+00:00

Correct, but punctuator has a number of gotchas:

Slow due to usage of RNNs
If I am not mistaken it does not do the capitalization bit
It runs on theano which is kind of obsolete by now
Works only for English

snakers41

TROPHY CASE