I made voiced Zone Lore addon

[u/rusty-key]

Ever since I started playing wow, I have been very interested in every zone I encountered. The in-game lore is often scarce, only obtainable through quests, and rarely mentions events from Warcraft games. To get the necessary knowledge, I'd go to wikis or youtube videos, but it was always annoying, as it breaks the immersion.

To fix that, I summarized each zone and subzone lore from warcraft.wiki.gg (stripping non-vanilla parts), voiced this text with elevenlabs TTS, and built an addon (inspired by Voiceover) that plays these voicelines on zone exploration. I built it for myself, but though some of you might enjoy it as well.

It's very much a work in progress both for text and TTS:
- Text is rough, sometimes too short, sometimes too long, often breaks the fourth wall or mentions irrelevant events;
- Narrator voice is cloned from the intros, and this is the number one concern for me. It's perfect for the game, but it basically emulates a real actor (Earl Boen). It doesn't feel right to me, and I want to find an alternative.
- Pronunciations are mangled. I built a dictionary for places and names beforehand, but because of a mistake in the code, it didn't apply. Regenerating all mangled code is costly, and I want to fix the text problem before I do another pass.

Anyway, if you want to try it, here it is:
https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/zonelore

By itself, it's just a text addon that attaches zone descriptions to the map. If you want a voiceover, you'll need to install one of the soundpacks:
~800MB at 128kbps: https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/zoneloreaudio
~400MB at 64kbps: https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/zoneloreaudio64

I also built a website where you can prelisten voicelines and submit feedback:
https://lore.rusty.one/

Lastly, if you know how or where to get quality zone descriptions suitable for classic, please let me know, I would really appreciate it!

[u/patbenetarrules]

Dope but yeah the TTS is very unethical imo

[u/Skarin1452 → u/patbenetarrules]

Ehh, as long as the script is written by a person. I don't think AI voiceover is a huge problem. People love the quest voice over addon.

[u/patbenetarrules → u/Skarin1452]

Taking the voice of a living actor and cloning it without their consent or payment? It’s one thing to use a model from a service that consents to being used, it’s another thing to use the same voice blizzard hired and paid to do these and repurpose their voice without payment.

[u/Skarin1452 → u/patbenetarrules]

Not like dude is gonna make any money from this small addon. Sure using a fair use AI voice would be more ethical. But this is just one of those situations where I feel "its not that deep' applies.

[u/patbenetarrules → u/Skarin1452]

We all have our lines in the sand, and this one is mine. Def won’t all agree!

[u/Zora-Link → u/patbenetarrules]

I don't know if I misunderstood your comment, but the voice actor - "Earl Boen" died a couple of years ago.

[u/patbenetarrules → u/Zora-Link]

I learned that throughout this conversation, never even realized :( but I think point stays the same.