In the metaverse, everyone can sound like Morgan Freeman

The metaverse's next big opportunity: voice

As the tech industry is getting ready for the metaverse, most companies are focusing on the visual component of social online worlds: How will our avatars look when we all work and play online all day? How will those NFT art pieces be displayed? And will our virtual living rooms be just as messy as our real ones?

Far less attention is being paid to audio in the metaverse, and more specifically what everyone’s avatar will sound like. Voice will be a major component of virtual worlds, and the companies shaping the future of voice could become key enablers of the metaverse.

The metaverse requires really good spatial audio. It’s no accident that companies like Meta and Microsoft have been investing in spatial audio for their VR hardware and platforms. Spatial audio is key to conveying a sense of presence in 3D platforms, and really good low-latency implementations can make all the difference between being immersed and feeling out of place.

• That’s especially true as companies are looking to broaden the appeal of their platforms. “Spatial audio is super important for meetings, especially for business meetings where there's a group,” Second Life founder Philip Rosedale told me this week.
• Rosedale’s startup High Fidelity has been developing spatial audio hardware that is being used by Clubhouse and Spatial Web, among others.
• Second Life, on the other hand, has been using a spatial audio solution from Vivox, a startup that got acquired by Unity in 2019.
• That partnership may be on the way out now that High Fidelity has teamed up with the company. “We're definitely going to look at how to use High Fidelity spatial audio with Second Life,” Rosedale said.

Synthetic voices could make metaverse assistants more personal. Google and Amazon have long experimented with giving their respective assistants a variety of voices, which has included cameos from celebrities like John Legend and Issa Rae.

• In the metaverse, we’ll likely see a lot more customization options for personal assistants, which could include a visual component. After all, why talk to a voice-of-god-like Alexa when you can chat face-to-face with an embodied assistant?
• Some early examples for this include Magic Leap’s Mica demo as well as the Samsung-incubated Neon assistant.
• And once you’re talking to a virtual human, why not customize their look and voice? AI voice creation has seen massive advancements in recent years, to the point where your future assistant may look and sound like any celebrity of your choosing.

In the metaverse, you can sound however you want. Of course, synthetic voices aren’t just for virtual humans. If you can change the look of your avatar, then why not the sound of your voice?

• Valencia-based Voicemod has been providing voice modification technologies to PC gamers for years. Now, it wants to bring the same technology to social online worlds. “We want to be the voice of the metaverse,” Voicemod CEO Jaime Bosch told me recently.
• Voicemod recently launched a new licensing initiative to integrate its technology directly into third-party products, including headphones and AR/VR headsets. Bosch said that we could see the first hardware products with integrated voice modification to launch in the next few months.
• Up until now, Voicemod has been using DSPs to tweak voices and make them sound like a robot, or Darth Vader. However, the company has been busy working on machine learning to create synthetic voices from scratch.
• The goal is not only to make you sound like a completely different person, but also to improve the way you already sound. “We are enhancing your mic,” Bosch said. “We are removing your background noise.” Small changes like that could help a lot to make it feel like you are really in the same room with others.

That being said, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to sound like a completely different person in the metaverse. “At the end of the day, it’s about identity and expression,” Bosch said.

— Janko Roettgers

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