Another new feature now in Beta Test : Space Chatter! Yet another reason to switch to using a Cloud based service for your EDCoPilot voice.
This is the first phase of adding in character voice "radio transmissions" to the game. This will assign a random cloud voice and random pitch effect, generate the voice file based on the received message, and then play the generated sound file. It will use the same voice for the same character for the duration of your EDCoPilot session.
In this first phase, items like pirate threats, cruise line announcements and top 1% boasts, messages around stations, or even Commanders chatting in system, can be heard in clearly rendered voices. These have a radio effect added, with optional radio beeps at start and end of the sound file. I tried it in a Haz Res site and it was a much more immersive experience, getting all the pirate "what do you have in your hold" messages!
In future phases I plan to add random ship chatter around stations, and am considering adding chatter when in the station and when in intense combat areas.
Personally I have all 3 supported Cloud voice services configured (Google Cloud TTS, Amazon Polly and Microsoft Azure TTS). This feature will randomly pick a voice from any of the 3 providers, so I have probably 80 to 90 voices for it to choose from (if i set the "use non-native English voice" option to have non-English voices attempting to say English phrases. Yes. sometimes they will mash their lines.).
For those EDCoPilot users who havent tried a Cloud voice service yet, I definitely recommend it. The quality compared to Windows TTS is so much better.
All 3 Cloud providers require a billing account to be set up with a credit card or similar on file, but each have a free quota of TTS generation per month, though Amazon's free quota only lasts 12 months. EDCoPilot keeps track of your usage and will warn you if you are getting close to the limit where you will start to be billed, and you can simply switch off use of the service for the remainder of the month if you dont want to incur a charge. Additionally it caches its mp3s so does not waste usage generating a phrase it already has stored for the selected voice. I mainly use Google TTS and have never been charged for its use, and i play daily. Setup of the service can be a little tricky, but once it is done the results are so much better.
For those that havent tried EDCoPilot yet – details and (FREE) download available at
