Jaime Bosch
Contributor
Jaime Bosch is the co-founder and CEO of Voicemod.
In the many conversations around “the metaverse” sparked by the Facebook corporate name transition to Meta, much has focused on the visual elements. What’s hardly mentioned is audio. Yet voice really matters when making a virtual environment come to life.
Sometimes, it’s everything.
Just ask Spike Jonze. The movie director discarded the original voice actor in the title role of his 2013 film “Her” and substituted Scarlett Johansson’s sultry timbres. Although Samantha, a computer operating system, never appeared in the flesh, Jonze felt the original actress hadn’t nailed the emotion required to create a three-dimensional persona.
Voice was critical to creating a fleshed-out character that could absorb the viewer into the story’s premise and make it fully believable.
As The Washington Post noted, many keystones of the Meta vision of the metaverse already exist in video gaming — only in disconnected gaming worlds. And in the gaming universe, voice is playing an increasingly important role. Meta promises a unified, interoperable experience, but without a rich panoply of highly tex …
