Trying out the Second Life open voice chat beta

Today I bravely downloaded the Second Life Voice Beta version that Linden Lab put in open beta last night.

I plugged in a headset I’ve used with Dragon Naturally Speaking and then ventured into the test server. I spent a good 15 minutes travelling the sim meeting other people trying to find somebody to actually test the voice function. One person I ran into chatted with me — by text — that he too was looking for the same thing.

There is a new preference tab that deals with the Voice Chat and you can define a key to press when to talk or the default of just talking wherever you roam. I tried both and no luck.

Jeska Linden offers the following troubleshooting advice:

1. You may fail to connect to voice the first time you login. If you’ve configured your microphone correctly but don’t see the speaking indicator within 20-30 seconds of launching the new viewer, please try re-logging or disabling and re-enabling voice from the Voice Chat tab in the Preferences panel. This should correct the issue.

Ahh, well I never saw any “speaking indicator” although my headset was working correctly and I could hear myself in Windows. I logged in a second time in search of the mighty Speaking Indicator. It only worked after I teleported to another sim. I had an interesting conversation with two complete strangers about voice capability on Sims and we quickly discovered more weaknesses than strengths.

I was given a notecard list of the voice activated sims which you’ll need to know if you check out the beta area too:

Lusk (voice)
Morris (voice)
Tehama (voice)
Gibson (voice)
Da Boom (voice)
Balance (voice)
Abbotts (voice)
Bisque (voice)
Pulveria (voice)
Merino (voice)

First thing you want to do is enable the “push to talk” which is located in PREFERENCES->VOICE CHAT. Oddly, the default option is to leave your chat open and thus everything is being heard in your microphone. People don’t like that I learned right away.

I tried different keys and decided the middle mouse button was the best to activate the push to talk. Think walkie-talkie. That’s what others I chatted with were using too. The default is the SHIFT key which turns on the sticky keys after you press it five times, so unless you need it and want to keep that you might want to disable that by visiting the Windows control panel and accessibility options. If sticky keys get activated and you need to DEactivate, then just press both shift keys at the same time.

The voice quality was very good and when you walk away your voice softens. I found that conversations beyond a couple people became kind of awkward. In real life you can look at people and while you can look at the green indicator in SL Voice Chat it becomes a bit too easy to talk over other people unintentionally. I found myself saying “excuse me” more than I would in real life. I suppose you get better at that over time.

I also found it difficult to hear others when a couple people talked at the same time. I’ve been to lots of crowded places before and it wasn’t the same type of crowd noise that your ears can fixate on and pick out the voices.

It will be interesting to see how much this actually gets used once it’s rolled out in world. I think there will be certain circumstances where it makes good sense and is used frequently but I still don’t see myself using it very often. It’s a better implementation than I had expected though once you realize that you need to be in a special voice-activated sim with push-to-talk enabled.

There isn’t a handy in-world way of reporting bugs with the voice chat (is there?), it appears you’ll need to use your browser and report bugs/issues/problems here. I asked a few people when we might see Voice Chat come to the mainland and new sims and the answer was in July. Not sure if any official announcement has been made with a date yet, so consider that purely third party speculative at this point.