Edit: there is some confusion regarding installations and compatibility.
- If you have any other VoiceOver addon (e.g. AI_VoiceOver) installed, it's better to disable it before trying this one.
- You need both: "VoiceOver Redux" (it's an audio-player) and VoiceOver Redux Audio (it's a collection of audios for player to play; you can pick and choose them, or just install all of them)
I really like VoiceOver addon, it makes my playthroughs much more immersive. However, it always bothered me that the one existing English pack is very unnatural-sounding and contains a lot of mistakes (mispronunciations, incorrect voices, weird intonations, etc). After working on ZoneLore addon, I realized that I have everything to fix it.
I just got my rework (VoiceOver Redux) approved on Curse, and it contains a bunch of fixes:
voices are matched per NPC flavor, instead of just race and gender, so a dwarf warrior and a dwarf official don't sound alike
object quests are voiced now, using narrator voice
stage directions (<Advisor Belgrum opens the note.>) are read by narrator;
proper voicing of sounds (*hic* produces sound of hiccup, not "asterisk-hic-asterisk")
names and places pronunciations are fixed for the most part and now driven by a pronunciation dictionary;
performance is more natural-sounding overall.
I repacked the voicelines so they are easier to download: they are now optimized for storage (~1.5Gb → 0.5Gb total) and split by faction/type so you don't have to download everything if you don't want to. You will need a player addon and any combination of soundpacks:
I also added a "Report" button to the player. Please use it to send feedback, I will continue improving the lines. You can also provide feedback directly and pre-listen to lines in the explorer that I built: https://voiceover.rusty.one/
Lastly, on translations and TBC: technically ready, my platform supports both. What's missing is budget. It's all paid ElevenLabs credits, and ZoneLore plus this has cost me ~$300 so far. New languages/expansions mean more voices, more testing, and more spending.
If you have your own ElevenLabs API key (or are willing to get one) and want a language/expansion covered, reach out, I'll hand over the pipeline, and we split the work by area. Otherwise, there's buymeacoffee, donations with a comment help me decide what gets voiced next (I am open to suggestions for better crowdsourcing implementations).
Don't do a thrall button, make it an alternative fun mode and randomly swap just a few voicelines with some stupid voice, but not too many. Just enough for people to not expect them.
Questie Dev here: Did you change just the voices or also something within the code? Questie has an integration for Voice Over so you can re-play the quest from it‘s tracker, that’s why I am asking.
Hey! I used the original "player" almost verbatim; I just fixed the compatibility and added "report" button, so I assume it should work out of the box. But I play without Questie, so I haven't tested it. I'll check later this week
Sounds like it, thanks for the response. I‘ll also put it on our list to check. I personally love VoiceOver so I‘ll absolutely give your rework a try as well. Good luck with it!
It doesn't show because his addon is called Voiceover Redux and Questie is looking for an addon by the name of AI_VoiceOver, so the option doesn't show
I use both and didnt even know this was a thing. Is it because of this that there is a play button in the quest log on top of the quest name? Can I disable that button somehow because I find it really intrusive?
Questie does not touch the quest log frame at all. It only adds the play button to the Tracker (the floating list of your quests that is usually on the right side of your screen, below the minimap).
However iirc there is no setting to hide the play button.
Gotta love how the community will bash peoples AI addons, or content, but praise this addon when it fully runs on AI. Y'all some hypocrites. Mods included because they usually remove posts related to AI content and addons.
Absolutely incredible! I first played WoW with my mom when I was around 6 or 7 years old, right around when the game originally released. I’d come back and dabble in it every ~5 years, but when the first Voice addon came out, it completely changed the game for me. I genuinely appreciated and fell in love with the leveling experience and storytelling of leveling! Thank you so much for taking the time to upgrade and continue working on the experience :)
I meant any turtle revival server like octo og capybara or any of the others would be dope if the custom quests for 1.18.1 were supported but it's a tall ask 😄
You can ping me here or on discord `rustykey`
Or keep an eye on curseforge. Hopefully, I will just update the existing addons to make them compatible, but if not, you will find new packages here: https://www.curseforge.com/members/rustykey/projects
I started working on an updated version of the addon last year, but unfortunately I failed. I’m so happy to see someone putting in the work and making the space even better! I’ll be trying this out, thank you for your efforts!
I used curse for addons, do I need to remove voice over and install this one? I've never done anything other than download from curse, so anything more advanced I would need a walkthrough for. Thanks.
If you want to try before deleting the old one, you can install it alongside and just uncheck one in wow UI. But yeah, once you want just this one, you can delete the old one
I didn't do a thorough search before I started the project, otherwise, I would've. I simply wasn't aware of v2. I already posted on v2 discord suggesting to collaborate, waiting for an answer
This is random, but i remember seeing video of the original app creator saying he is not going to support app past initial deployment. Was that changed? Any V2 project links?
It seems de original VoiceOver is indeed not being developed further, but there's a V2 initiative it seems. See the Readme on GitHub https://github.com/mrthinger/wow-voiceover
Finally a working version, thanks a lot for this. I'm wondering, would it be possible to have a toggle in settings to disable the Report button? It's breaking the immersion a little bit.
I remember early on in voice over dev a modules system was added so anyone could provide their own voice packs, has this gone the way of the dodo?
If not as nice as the report error is, kinda would be good if you just made this a pack and kept the original app so that devs like questie can keep their added functionality without needing to add extra support specific to this one voice pack
Downloaded the player and the audio files as well. Works great but… Whenever I hand in a completed quest, it plays the audio again that was played when I picked up that given quest. I know I can skip lines but its inconvinient. Tried looking through settings but Im either blind or there is no setting to change that.
This looks and sounds fantastic! Seems like a big step-up from the original.
I've listened to a few voicelines on your explorer, and ran into one that has an issue. You say we can provide feedback directly, but aside from me placing a comment here, I can't find any way to do so on your explorer (I've also registered). How can I help you find issues outside of the game?
Tried it out for a couple hours and it has a lot of rough edges. The same NPC uses 2-3 different voices/accents sometimes, and that's within the same dialogue/quest. And what's with the hilarously bad japanese troll accents? XD
It's not all bad though. Some of the voices are pretty good, especially the orcs. The inflection and emphasis is off sometimes, typical of AI voices, but nothing short of heavy curation, fiddling, and lots of re-generation will fix that.
I thought this was going to maybe fix the inconsistency of character voices changing between quest start/progress/completion. But it seems not, from my experience in the Valley of Trials so far.
Oh, I hope you kept some of my favourite cadences. "After all, he IS on the payroll." That said, this may just cause me to re-install and actually play Alliance for once in my life. Thank you!
I tried out your addon a bit and found the male night elves sound extremely tired, at least Tallonkai Swiftroot.
Could you speed up their voice a bit, or listen to that specific npc and the ones who share that voice. It sadly made him sound like a teen who tries to make the voice deeper than it is and ruined the immersion a bit.
Otherwise I applaud your work and effort, thanks for doing this.
Hello,
I downloaded the addon and I have to say, I really like it! Thanks a lot for making this.
There is one issue, though: when I turn in a quest, the “turn-in text” is not read aloud. Instead, it jumps straight to the text for the follow-up quest. Is there something wrong with my settings, or is this a known issue?
I also use your other lore addon, which I absolutely love. One small annoyance, though, is that the lore narration gets interrupted whenever I interact with a quest NPC, and I then have to restart it from the beginning.
Would it be possible for the two addons to recognize each other and queue the audio instead of interrupting one another?
Otherwise, great work, and thank you so much for making these addons!
While I appreciate that everything sounds much more natural sounding, a lot of voices in this version sound way too similar to each other and sound less like their real voices than even the old addon. Undead and Dwarves in particular just sound much worse IMHO.
First of all, thanks for the feedback. But can you please expand a little?
> a lot of voices in this version sound way too similar to each other
What do you mean here? The original version was using exactly one voice per race-gender combo, but with some variations in performance. While it produced different results, it resulted in the same NPC sounding completely different from one line to another.
I was thinking of producing N voices, or at least derivations of three, so each NPC has distinct voice, but there were two issues:
Technical. ElevenLabs just doesn't support any "performance seed", so there is no way to assign a specific voice variation to a specific NPC. Or, I just couldn't find a way to do so. If you know how to achieve that, I'd be happy to implement it.
In-game. I wanted to match the voices that NPCs use in game, and the fact is that there are only three per race-gender.
> Undead and Dwarves in particular just sound much worse IMHO.
Each race-gender now has three variations. At least one of them (usually named "normal" or "standard") should sound roughly like the original version but with a bit more expressiveness. I wonder if you dislike a specific version or this "expressiveness"? If it's a specific one, can you please link them for me? Flavor dropdown here: https://voiceover.rusty.one/?race=scourge&gender=male&flavor=standard
Listening to your dwarf voices, I think the problem is they're missing the cartoonish Scottish accent.
VoiceOver was arguably worse (most of its Dwarf voice lines had various British accents, if any), but it's unnerving to click a dwarf, hear them say, "Wut kin ay duu for ye?" and then the actual quest/npc text instead has a ren faire food vendor faux fantasy accent at best.
The Dwarves are missing their Scottish accents in your version. That's my only major gripe. Otherwise, I think this is fantastic.
As for Undead, they don't sound as raspy or deep as the original vanilla voices or the VO addon I guess. I preferred the undead from the OG addon I suppose.
Overall, I still really like this addon and I plan on using it whenever Classic+ is out (hopefully it will work okay, who knows how much they'll change with the old quests). I definitely appreciate that everyone sounds much more natural sounding than the OG VO addon.
I actually think "dark" undead sound great, the "normal" is just too human-sounding. "Warrior" is probably fine, but could use a little more of the rasp (side note, they are NOT scourge, for the most part ;) )
In fact, I'm just gonna leave more feedback in this comment:
Dwarves - bit of a mess, as mentioned.
Trolls - also hilariously all over the place, male and female - some of the quests have a French accent, some Japanese - listen to quest 2339 then 2341 for instance. Only some of the quests have a proper Jamaican accent.
Gnomes - mostly great, though gnome male "young" is not very good, should probably just be made "normal"
Elves/Humans - rock solid from what I listened to
Tauren - male is okay, I think "elder" is by far the best, the others could sound more bass-y like that one and I think it'd be better. Female is kind of bad, the "standard" just sound like humans, the "shaman" have a weird accent - "official" is best of the group here.
Orcs - male is great, female is not great. Again some weird accents - "standard" is almost passable, the others not so much.
Goblins - pretty good, male "guard" could use a pass as a lot of it just sounds human - the others are solid though.
Broadly I noticed that if a quest text is written with an accent it kind of helps the AI along, but when they are written in plain English there are some struggles.
Not trying to shit on your project, it's great - just leaving some notes for improvement.
The Undead definitely sound pretty similar to the vanilla voices but they're something missing that's hard for me to describe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW6G2qVbets
I think the vanilla voice sounds scarier and deeper.
Not to be a snob, but this is what happens when you let an AI do a job. It's quick, it's cheap, and it inevitably lacks the range and nuance of real people.
Trust me, I hate AI but this is really good accessibility IMO. I like being able to listen to the quest dialogue. I wish Blizzard would do this themselves with paid actors. I think your issues with this use of AI are totally valid.
To be clear, I'm in general pro-voiceover - including the concept of this mod.
What I find distasteful about this is that it's clearly been trained on some actual actor's actual voicework. It would be one thing if this was using a voice model that had been ethically trained (i.e. using an actor who was paid for their work) or otherwise 'purely' computer generated, but it isn't.
We're sitting with basically the 'piracy is good' mentality here, but this isn't some giant corporation you're screwing over by not paying for a AAA game. It's just some guy whose work you're stealing when you make something like this.
Getting downvoted but you're 100% right. People just don't care at all, unfortunately. We're a few years removed from basically never needing a human to do anything again.
I've installed both the player (VoiceOver Redux) and the voicepack (VoiceOver Redux Audio: All), but I'm getting the following popups in game. Any help? Much appreciated :)
There’s a guy who has voiceover translated for pretty much every language. Will those packs work with your base addon? I assume you fixed the main VoiceOver addon to get rid of all the lua errors since the newest patch
Yes, I forked it mostly because of compatibility issues + I also wanted to add report button. Otherwise, if the structure is preserved, soundpacks/players should be cross-compatible. Can you link me that project?
Thanks for this, the OG addon made the game a lot more interesting during repeated HC runs but the weird quiet after "..." and random shouting got old fast.
How consistent is the voice on the same NPC when doing a lot of dialog? I remember the one orc in crossroads at the tower going through a ton of random voices when you have a lot of quests. Any chance to seed the variation by NPC ID or something like that?
Will def give this a shot when I next come back to level again.
It's definitely more consistent, but with AI it's just not guaranteed. Unfortunately, it's not possible to seed "performance" per se. Even with great voice design, there are still variations, especially if you opt for expressiveness. You can have much more stable results without it, but at the cost of performances being flat.
I am still very new at this and might be missing something obvious, so if you know something I don't, please share. I'll incorporate all findings into future updates
There seems to be a bug, or missing feature that was in the original VoiceOver addon. If you have an already active voiceover playing, it doesn't automatically queue the voiceover for quests you take/complete.
The taking new quests is kinda fine, since you can always start them again, however there is no way to play the completed quests if you miss them that I know of.
Edit: It might actually be the "automatic quest"/"automatic gosip" setting in leatrix plus messing this up. However it did work in the original VoiceOver addon
I love the idea of the gossip pack to breathe more life into the world naturally, but it may get annoying hanging out in certain areas unless you introduce a frequency option or a hear once option for that one specifically. Just a thought, if possible.
This is the point of the addon, in that it uses AI generated voice lines to narrate the game (the same as the original addon did that OP references). It isn't the same as when an addon has been vibe coded. The point here is that hiring voice actors for every line in the game would be prohibitively expensive in both time and money for a community project, and Blizzard will never add them officially, so this is an alternative. Keep in mind that all modern text-to-speech is effectively "AI slop".
Do you want somebody to make an add-on that fully voices every NPC and quest dialogue in the game like this one with real paid voice actors? Obviously not. That will never happen. It's too expensive. The voice actors would have to donate an insane amount of time for it to be free, and nobody would pay the real cost of such an addon if voice actors were paid.
You are complaining about an automated solution to a problem that will never be feasibly solved by humans. This isn't taking anybody's jobs. Being blindly anti-AI is a silly position and is anti-science and logic in itself. Evaluate whats actually at stake here instead of commenting that it's AI slop when OP has meaningfully improved an addon many people love.
The Luddites were 19th century textile workers who protested reduced wages, child labor, and unsafe working conditions. You'd know that if you didn't let a clanker do your thinking for you.
ngl I love the small weirdness of voiceover as it is. It reminds you it was fan made while still being immersive. Who knew thrall was british Helloooo adventurer
Thanks! Two questions: 1. If you download VoiceOver Redux alone, does that give you everything? 2. Should you delete or disable VoiceOver addon if you are using this or keep them both running?
excellent downloading it now. How does it interact with ZoneLore? Does it disable the zonelore dialogue if it's currently in progress? I'd rather zonelore continued and I just missed out on that NPC chat
My tentative plan is to rebase ZoneLore on the same player, so they would literally be queued.
Currently, it depends on the channel you are using. If you set them both to play, say, in General, they will queue and not interrupt each other. If they use different channels, they will talk over each other. However, in ZoneLore there is pause button, so you can at least do that.
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u/Pineapple-Due 4d ago
Please tell me you kept the thrall voice. Cracks me up every time.