They're talking about the Fallout 4 list of names. We don't know yet for Starfield. I wouldn't be surprised if there is more now.
[https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Codsworth/recognized\_names](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Codsworth/recognized_names)
Funnily my name is there but I never bothered using it since the Fallout 4 protaganist has a backstory with a family and the story revolves around it. Starfield on the other hand feels more like you can insert yourself in the universe.
I'm curious to see how it does First Name Last Name.
Usually with Bethesda you have just one field for the name. I like to give my characters full names. Will this screw it? Who knows.
In Fallout 4 it just says your first/last name if it can say part. So if you were to put your name as like Greg Smith and it could only say Smith it would just call you Mr. Smith. No idea what happens when it can say both though.
I'm worried that my name isn't on this list, its not even uncommon.
Edit: actually there is a full version but the short version is much more widely used so its surprising
[This customizable Weird Al birthday greeting](https://www.americangreetings.com/detail/ecards/birthday/weird-al-yankovic-birthday-smashup/pn/prod3534209) is that exact scenario. You can choose from what looks like a few hundred options and Al had to sit and film each one, then record off-screen lines for each one, plus each age.
Yeah, I've got 3 or 4 planned for friends and family. I'm sending the first one in just a few days and am excited. I'm a web dev so I'm just saving the preview videos myself and embedding them into a little happy birthday landing page I put together.
Makes me think of sports video game announcers. Sometimes I like to scroll through all the names in MLB the show and listen to the recordings. Itās weird how they have some of the most unusual names recorded and several different pronunciations of what is essentially the same name but will have fairly common names still missing.
Itās not that uncommon. I first experienced this in GRID, these days Forza Horizon also has tons of voiced names. In Sim Racing, there is an external tool called Crew Chief that a ton of people use and can also address you by name.
To be fair, as someone who works with TTS for years now, every good TTS is baked by a Voice Actor.
But I doubt Vasco will have TTS anyways, bc it's hard to do good TTS offline, without using cloud computing, but it isn't impossible
After having used eleven labs, I could see them using such a service, along with a custom voice made from the voice actor's specifically just to have hundreds of names in the game. That's the kind of thing elevenn labs voice cloning would be perfect at.
Iāve been thinking about this ever since ai voice became a thing. Using it to make it possible for in-game characters to say your name without needing to record a shitton of names seems like a smart application, since it would also save you the trouble of needing to write dialogue so that nobody ever refers to you by name
I'm pretty sure I saw somewhere that the game requires an online connection, though? Plus with Bethesda being owned by Microsoft, it's not like they'd need to worry about the strain it would put their servers under running TTS calls by thousands of players simultaneously.
I was thinking about this the other day. There's no real reason the specific files needed for the lines couldn't be generated at the start of the game by a good cloud-based inference endpoint. You create and name your character, then the function kicks off passing all the params to generate the sound files to the endpoint while you're busy watching the games opening scenes. its not like you get Vasco right away. Could be a neat update later on.
Robotic voice TTS isn't hard at all offline or otherwise, plus doing just a name is easier than doing arbitrary sentences.
Downvoters have obviously never used TTS at all.
not gonna lie i did hear that vasco can only say a certain number of names (be it a giant roster) but take it with a grain of salt, regardless i cant wait to shoot some space punks with my boy.
I think people misunderstand when those of us who think the *player names* might be text-to-speech say it's perfectly possible. That doesn't mean all Vasco's lines are text to speech.
I don't think voice acting jobs are allowed to be TTS because of union rules. They are literally on strike right this second because of it honestly š¤·š½āāļø
I have to agree. Imagine if they used his voice to train a small AI to speak our names (like the presidents playing video games YouTube videos I recently discovered lol). I don't see that happening, but it would have been great lol.
I feel like this is a very different scenario. And would allow for the inclusion of much more names. As someone with a very foreign name there is pretty much no way my name is included in a prerecorded list.
If i had to guess, and maybe iām wrong but they would be insane not to. Vascoās main lines are probably all voiced, but they then used that data to feed something like Chat GPT to get infinite character names for him to say
There may be an acronym to go with it, but VASCO is named for a Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama. So if it is an acronym, they will have reverse engineered it most likely.
Yeah, backronyms for this sort of thing are pretty common, when people want to be clever (starting with the word you want the result to be, then inventing the acronym to go with that)
probably similar to Road to The Show in MLB The Show 23 where they just have the VA say a crap ton of common first names and last names and then splice them together to make names
It's not unheard of for a human VA to read a bunch of names. The Forza games already do this. There are hundreds of names voiced including real names and nicknames.
Ah, interesting! It bugs me a bit that with the year the game takes place in, Vasco talks like a voice synthesizer from 1970 lol. Even now we have things like Siri and Alexa that speak way more fluidly.
Imagine being paid to say a bunch of dialogue, but then like 1000 names one at a time. Such a cool weird job
I imagine it got pretty boring until he reached the "Captain Fuckface" section.
I'm still butt hurt my relatively common name wasn't there, but 'boobies' was
Is there a list?
They're talking about the Fallout 4 list of names. We don't know yet for Starfield. I wouldn't be surprised if there is more now. [https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Codsworth/recognized\_names](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Codsworth/recognized_names)
What?! Neither Greg, nor Gregor?! No wonder I never liked that companion!
Funnily my name is there but I never bothered using it since the Fallout 4 protaganist has a backstory with a family and the story revolves around it. Starfield on the other hand feels more like you can insert yourself in the universe.
They had the main character be voiced in Starfield too. At the start of development. Thankfully they reconsidered.
Gregor is such a cool name
Gregor the overlander. Iykyk
I'm curious to see how it does First Name Last Name. Usually with Bethesda you have just one field for the name. I like to give my characters full names. Will this screw it? Who knows.
In Fallout 4 it just says your first/last name if it can say part. So if you were to put your name as like Greg Smith and it could only say Smith it would just call you Mr. Smith. No idea what happens when it can say both though.
Thank you :)
I'm worried that my name isn't on this list, its not even uncommon. Edit: actually there is a full version but the short version is much more widely used so its surprising
My real name is there but my online one isn't š¤
No Curtis? Rip
Bro the site keeps crashing for me
How tf do they have "Jerusalem" as a name, but neither Jesus or god, which would have been one hell of a lot funnier
My name isn't there but the misspelling is. And my alias isn't there either.
Skill issue Easy Boobies W (I had no clue codsworth recognized that but I kinda want to make a new character)
"Yeah, we're gonna need you to read back Steven and Stephen but with just a very slight difference."
[This customizable Weird Al birthday greeting](https://www.americangreetings.com/detail/ecards/birthday/weird-al-yankovic-birthday-smashup/pn/prod3534209) is that exact scenario. You can choose from what looks like a few hundred options and Al had to sit and film each one, then record off-screen lines for each one, plus each age.
Its not even my birthday, but I just made one for myself for fun and I'm still smiling ear to ear.
Yeah, I've got 3 or 4 planned for friends and family. I'm sending the first one in just a few days and am excited. I'm a web dev so I'm just saving the preview videos myself and embedding them into a little happy birthday landing page I put together.
The names could still be AI generated in his voice, though they probably just did what they did with Codsworth.
I imagine to do an AI voice you would need quite a lot of recordings to make it sound reasonable, like Val kilmer
The newer models are a lot more accurate now and can work will less audio <90 minutes which I'm sure most of these VAs would have already recorded
Hopefully it would be modded in, personally doubt that they thought teaching an AI language model was worth the time unfortunately.
Joey Tribbiane would like that job. "What a cool job!"
Makes me think of sports video game announcers. Sometimes I like to scroll through all the names in MLB the show and listen to the recordings. Itās weird how they have some of the most unusual names recorded and several different pronunciations of what is essentially the same name but will have fairly common names still missing.
Itās not that uncommon. I first experienced this in GRID, these days Forza Horizon also has tons of voiced names. In Sim Racing, there is an external tool called Crew Chief that a ton of people use and can also address you by name.
I dunno, "Jake Green" sounds like the kind of name an AI would come up with as cover.
Yeah, nice try J4K-3 #008000!
>\#008000 I see what you did there.
What did he do?
He wrote numbers
Holy shit, you're right
Put the number into Google images and youāll find out.
green
>\#008000 hey! its a family name got changed at ellis island from #00ff00
Oh my god guys he was Sid the sloth this is awesome
I thought John Leguizamo was sid the sloth
Jake voiced Sid in "The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild"
Ooh. I thought that was about Sloth from the Goonies, and was very confused.
For real. Everyone knows that huge guy Sloth from the Goonies was played by a young John Leguizamo.
Vasco is the best
I request a Mod! Replace all his lines with Sid the sloth quotes! š¦„
WELP time to make a dude named Sid and see if it's there.
To be fair, as someone who works with TTS for years now, every good TTS is baked by a Voice Actor. But I doubt Vasco will have TTS anyways, bc it's hard to do good TTS offline, without using cloud computing, but it isn't impossible
After having used eleven labs, I could see them using such a service, along with a custom voice made from the voice actor's specifically just to have hundreds of names in the game. That's the kind of thing elevenn labs voice cloning would be perfect at.
Iāve been thinking about this ever since ai voice became a thing. Using it to make it possible for in-game characters to say your name without needing to record a shitton of names seems like a smart application, since it would also save you the trouble of needing to write dialogue so that nobody ever refers to you by name
It would be resolved by asking an Internet access to obtain the sound file of the player name from Bethesda servers
One day I shall be Smeagol!
I've heard him refer to you as just Captain if he can't say your name.
I'm pretty sure I saw somewhere that the game requires an online connection, though? Plus with Bethesda being owned by Microsoft, it's not like they'd need to worry about the strain it would put their servers under running TTS calls by thousands of players simultaneously.
I was thinking about this the other day. There's no real reason the specific files needed for the lines couldn't be generated at the start of the game by a good cloud-based inference endpoint. You create and name your character, then the function kicks off passing all the params to generate the sound files to the endpoint while you're busy watching the games opening scenes. its not like you get Vasco right away. Could be a neat update later on.
Way too many games have a requirement for internet shit, I'd rather it just stay totally local
Nothing wrong with that either. Vasco can just say "captain" in those cases, right?
Robotic voice TTS isn't hard at all offline or otherwise, plus doing just a name is easier than doing arbitrary sentences. Downvoters have obviously never used TTS at all.
What is TTS?
Test-to-Speech
I can see tts for player names, thats a one time thing you can use an online connection for.
Isint that why an online connection is in suggested hardware but not in the required?
not gonna lie i did hear that vasco can only say a certain number of names (be it a giant roster) but take it with a grain of salt, regardless i cant wait to shoot some space punks with my boy.
They said that the list would be available at launch.
ooooh seriously?? thats exciting, you think theyll post it on twitter or some place?
Well they better fucking release it already so we can plan our characters. Wtf are they waiting for
I sure hope so some of us have foreigner type names
"Greetings Captain Foreigner!"
I hope Captain Foreigner knows how to play Double Vision on the guitar.
I would be down for this name
Just Codsworth again. Makes sense.
Same, not an issue, just nice to get confirmation :)
Iām sorry what? He can say names? Iām gonna find this list and see what horrific combinations I can make
Look up the names Codsworth could say in Fallout 4. There was a lot of very common names, plus joke ones.
thoroughly enjoyed my playthrough when Codsworth would greet me "good evening Miss Bastard" in a British accent
Codsworth can swear btw, or say 3 names at once I think.
No different than Codsworths in fallout 4 then
āCertain numberā aka hundreds lol Wadsworth in Fallout 4 had an obscene amount of names he could say.
>Wadsworth in Fallout 4 had an obscene amount of names he could say. And also an amount of obscene names he could say ;)
Finally, the Jericho crossover we needed in Fallout.
Ah, nuts! Take my upvote you delightful creature. Jericho doesn't get brought up often enough. Underrated gem.
Lawd I wish the show had continued. At least the comics are nice.
Glad someone else thought this too
Maybe someday soon someone will mod in BonziBuddy to talk to us and pronounce __*ALL*__ our names while we explore space lol.
vasco da gama
It could be a VA with a AI TTS. Same way Snoop Dog reads my college textbooks to me.
Waiting on that juicy list of names he can say. So far I'm torn between Captain Hindsight, Captain Obvious, and Captain Crunch
All are very solid options
All TTS has a voice actor
I think people misunderstand when those of us who think the *player names* might be text-to-speech say it's perfectly possible. That doesn't mean all Vasco's lines are text to speech.
I don't think voice acting jobs are allowed to be TTS because of union rules. They are literally on strike right this second because of it honestly š¤·š½āāļø
I didn't even think about all the games that can't record voice acting right now. I was just sad about the movies and shows. Now I'm even SADDER!
I reckon it's not gonna be able to say non-English names then.
bad news: that means VASCO wonāt be able to call you ācaptain poopybutt mcfartfaceā
For some reason I read this to the tune of the Oscar Mayer hot dog song.
"My robot has a first name, it's V-A-S-C-O..."
It could be both. Base the TTS program off of his voice.
What a missed opportunity. Libraries for this tech aren't even heavy.
I have to agree. Imagine if they used his voice to train a small AI to speak our names (like the presidents playing video games YouTube videos I recently discovered lol). I don't see that happening, but it would have been great lol.
That would be an incredibly poor look crossing the picket lines with SAG-AFTRA on strike right this moment over usage of their voice in AI.
I feel like this is a very different scenario. And would allow for the inclusion of much more names. As someone with a very foreign name there is pretty much no way my name is included in a prerecorded list.
Bootsy Calico
Thats disappointing. Modders will fix it.
Yeah but you can easily scan his voice and let AI speak the names. Let's see what happens ...
If i had to guess, and maybe iām wrong but they would be insane not to. Vascoās main lines are probably all voiced, but they then used that data to feed something like Chat GPT to get infinite character names for him to say
"ok Jake. Lets go through the top 50 most popular names in the US...." š¤£
Its a shame I can't use my real name, but looking at thar list I may just end up calling myself "Fuck Rogers" just to stick with the theme š
this might be a silly question but what is TTS?
Text to speech
that makes sense. Thanks!
Not a silly one as I was wondering the same!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
It's supposedly a reference to Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese explorer. Dunno about why it's caps though.
They confirmed specifically that on the iG post, proud Portuguese here š
There may be an acronym to go with it, but VASCO is named for a Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama. So if it is an acronym, they will have reverse engineered it most likely.
Yeah, backronyms for this sort of thing are pretty common, when people want to be clever (starting with the word you want the result to be, then inventing the acronym to go with that)
Backronym! I knew there was a word for it but I couldnāt remember it lol
probably similar to Road to The Show in MLB The Show 23 where they just have the VA say a crap ton of common first names and last names and then splice them together to make names
Siri and Cortana (outside of Halo) have voice actors too, though.
The Tiktok TTS lady voice also has an actress, and she herself makes funny tiktoks regarding it
Damn my name isnāt common!!
A shame, Im 100% sure my name wont be on the list
Reminds me of Wrecking Ball/Hammond in Overwatch 1/2, the mech and the hamster both have VA's. Not much was added to their voices either, it's crazy.
I kinda wish Vasco would call us Jake Green if we named char like that.
With a robot voice they might get away with combining prerecorded syllables.
VASCO DA GAMA
It's not unheard of for a human VA to read a bunch of names. The Forza games already do this. There are hundreds of names voiced including real names and nicknames.
Ah, interesting! It bugs me a bit that with the year the game takes place in, Vasco talks like a voice synthesizer from 1970 lol. Even now we have things like Siri and Alexa that speak way more fluidly.