Until recently, if you wanted to type something during any online game you were truly either the quick or the dead – the quick typist or the dead typist, that is. After all, you can't move in a game and type at the same time, and if you aren't moving, you're frag bait. Similarly, even if you could remember the name of a game command, such as “target next enemy,” but not the corresponding key, you were pretty much stuck. So how do you solve these age-old problems in gaming? Easy. Just speak the command or communication out loud. Of course, you'll need some software to recognise and translate or transmit your spoken words, and that's exactly what we're going to be looking at today – voice communication and voice command software for use in games.
The best things in life are free, and fittingly enough Team Sound is both free and quite possibly the best overall voice communication program in the roundup. Clocking in at a reasonable 1.75 megs and costing absolutely nothing, Team Sound proves particularly easy to install and set up, and includes a rather impressive list of features. The all-important voice communication aspect of it works rather well, and the sound quality is very good considering the amount of bandwidth it uses. Remember using a walkie-talkie as a kid or hearing one in an old war film? With Team Sound (and indeed most of the other programs), the sound quality is as good as you'd get talking over a walkie-talkie, or potentially better depending on your bandwidth. The program only offers three audio compression options, none of which go quite as low as some other programs in the round up, but sound quality is good on all compression settings and most importantly your game ping will hardly flinch with Team Sound running in the background.
In addition to regular voice communication, Team Sound includes a Battlefield Sequencing feature. This sends a pre-defined text string to any other Team Sound users connected to the same server as you at the press of a key. Team Sound will then use its text to speech feature to “speak” the words to the people you transmitted this text string to. It sends faster than spoken words and it's easier to take in than a typed text message. While it's hardly a killer feature, it's an interesting and useful one that's a snap to get going.