‘Voice Skins’ Could Soon Change How Gamers Sound Online

While voice chat is clearly a more effective tool to communicate with your team when gaming (versus typing), there are some downsides to revealing your voice, especially to strangers. For example it might reveal your age, your gender, your ethnicity, things you might not necessarily want strangers to know about you.

In some cases, especially with females, it can also lead to unwanted harassment. However it seems that a couple of MIT graduates are exploring the idea of “voice skins” through an app called Modulate. The idea is that by applying these “voice skins”, it will help change your voice to mask your identity or just for fun.

According to the company’s founder Mike Pappas, “You go online and have the freedom to design your avatar, choose your username, pick what communities you jump into. You can design your online persona completely separately from who you are in the real world. Modulate gives you the complete freedom to design your online persona from scratch instead of bringing the real world with you.”

In addition to helping protect your identity, Pappas believes that such a tool could be useful in helping gamers get more immersed into a game. For example imagine being able to use voice chat while sounding like a character from the game. Modulate is expected to be making its way into more games later this year, and have already been tested out on games such as Dota 2 and League of Legends.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Gaming, General
Tags: Apps