Chat with voice & Audio API [Update]

Updates Announcements
#1

Greetings Developers!

I am TheRealMotorbikematt, Senior Product Manager helping lead the development of future multimedia capabilities developers can include in their Roblox experiences. I wanted to share more details about the road ahead, and how we are incorporating suggestions from the community into our upcoming Chat with voice and Audio API rollouts.

The road ahead

Over the next few months, you will see updates on multimedia on Roblox, including progress on Audio APIs. We’re making these updates with the benefit of feedback from developers, learnings from the beta, and with an eye towards the future state of the platform – not just solving today’s problems but potential problems in the future.

One question we have heard from you is, why has this taken so long? The simple answer is that this work is challenging and takes time to do it the right way.

First, keeping the Roblox platform safe and civil for all age groups is a fundamental priority for us. Ensuring the best possible voice quality and performance for everyone remains a top priority. Since Chat with voice has been in Beta, we have learned a lot about how users speak on our platform, how audio performs across various devices, and how moderation can be most effective.

Second, in the course of our work on Chat with voice, we saw an opportunity to give the entire Audio API a significant upgrade. We have also been relentless in ensuring that our work is compatible with new technologies, such as Real Time Facial Animation and Generative AI. Simply put, we have leaned into our core value of setting a long-term vision to ensure that these next-generation APIs support user safety, perform well across all devices, and enable developers of all skill levels to create awesome sounding audio in their experiences.

I’m happy to say that Roblox’s new Audio APIs are the first steps toward providing you with powerful new ways to control audio, including selecting audio sources, adding dynamic effects, including spatial effects and volume control, create audio visualizations, and much more.

Developers that integrate our updated Audio APIs will be able to fine-tune their experiences with more opportunities to set fun limits on range, team audiences, and of course, customize the Chat with voice feature’s user interface.

In the coming months, we will provide additional updates on the future of multimedia on Roblox, including our progress on your Audio APIs. We are excited to release these APIs in the future and listen to what you and your fellow developers will create!

Until then, a heartfelt thank you for your ongoing patience and for continuing to provide feedback.

Sincerely,
TheRealMotorbikematt

374 Likes
Voice Chat Tooling
Modifying Spatial Audio
#2

This topic was automatically opened after 10 minutes.

#3

Hi TheRealMotorbikematt,

I’m excited to learn that there are Audio API updates coming soon! There are some audio features that I have been very patient to one day hear about, such as the ability to listen for someone starting a voice message (with something like VoiceChatService:MessageStarted() and VoiceChatService:MessageEnded() as an example) and being able to respond appropriately.

There are two main concerns that I have, however.

  1. When we experienced the Audio Privacy update, a lot of developers suddenly found that music in their workspace, music that they had permission to use from the audio creator, who uploaded the music on their own account – was suddenly unavailable. They contacted their music artist, but such music artist had either left Roblox altogether, did not have the time or patience to learn how Roblox’s privacy system worked, or were unwilling to share their original audio files for the developer to re-upload themselves. Is this going to be rectified at some point? Many developers are biding their time waiting for Roblox to re-enable public (or more easily share-able) music uploads, and official word on whether or not that toggle will be flipped would be very welcome.

  2. Is there going to be expanded capability on the Audio Filters? We already have a handful of effects available which can do a variety of things, but in many cases we are limited by the device memory – and sometimes the device doesn’t have enough memory for any kind of audio effects, leading to an endless stream of sad failure beeps when the audio system flushes its buffer. Is there going to be an update to streamline this system or have it use less memory?

117 Likes
#4

This is music to my ears. I’ve always wanted more sound control! What will this include, though? More Sound methods?

56 Likes
#5

I have been extremely unhappy with audio since the audio update last year. I have had countless commissioned audios declined with no help from appeals because it contains “copyrighted assets”, which it doesn’t, not to mention we’re still unable to make audios public, even 6s> sounds. This is extremely frustrating and should be fixed.

88 Likes
#6

I agree with this post as well. The current system to share sounds between developers is confusing. If the developer doesn’t know how, or refuses to, provide you with their Universe ID, you have to resort to dodgy API calls to find the required text to enter – and even then, you have to tell the developer how to accept your privacy sharing request, which itself is still not obvious. At the very least, I would appreciate the sharing system being streamlined, because the current one is very obtuse and hard to navigate.

55 Likes
#7

Hopefully the voice API updates will include reading playbackloudness, frequency, as well as allowing post processing effects to be added for more voice-based gameplay features.

46 Likes
#8

Does this mean that Voice Chat will be usable without being mass reported and falsely banned?

Am I allowed to talk without risking my account getting banned again?

This seems great!

EDIT: To those who don’t know what I’m referring to, look at this post:

EDIT 2: No. I apparently cannot talk without being suspended AGAIN.

EDIT 3 (7/19/23): Wow! Still an issue, what a surprise. Thanks roblox for not caring whatsoever.
Voice chat moderation is faulty and garbage, they clearly do not care as this has been an issue for months now.

47 Likes
#9

FINALLY!!! UNCOMMON ROBLOX W.

Also a unmute and mute apis would be good.

Another small suggestion you prob won’t add but would be cool, speech to text. You could have some type of warning saying the experience is using it so the users knows. It could bring a lot of cool stuff into play, like madlibs etc. Just an idea.

41 Likes
#10

Audio is cool but videos are better :roll_eyes:
We want an update on that

44 Likes
#11

Thank you for the update! However I feel like there is much to be desired as you have not given a date for WHEN we can expect the update, for any of these products. Just that “it is coming within a few months.”

This isn’t the first time the developer community has been ghosted about audio (specifically Voice Chat API). A few months ago, you wanted to roll Voice Chat out of Beta and did not acknowledge the most liked reply. And Roblox clients still have that Beta button! What happened to this?

Why does the company feel it necessary to launch the updated Voice Chat API with other products that it can do without? The most requested feature of the Voice Chat API has been consistently; “Give us a way to turn off microphones for certain players.” I do not want to over-simplify or step on toes, but how hard can it be to give developers a bool toggle for this?

Without any kind of Voice Chat API documentation, the traditional way of fixing the platform fell to the developers, creating an SDK that allows you to turn off (in a hacky way) disruptive users. I assume we will need to rely on this method for another few months until you give us a date or a surprise announcement.

Please just come out with the bool toggle for muting and unmuting players first. Please do not hold back the updated Voice Chat API waiting on support for Facial Animations or Generative AI.

Please give us an official and supported way of muting players.

68 Likes
#12

Is this related to the FFlagSelfiViewFeature is not a valid member of Folder “CoreGui.Modules.Modules.Flags” error message which seems to be given when I have beta features turned on and run the game?

29 Likes
#13

There’s still no Push To Talk which is a huge safety concern. You can also enable it unknowingly by clicking through UI.

We’ve been asking for 2 years for a push to talk, surely this wasn’t delayed due to “safety”. Can we please have these concerns addressed before further APIs are built out?

I know many users who refuse to enable voice chat until this is added.

68 Likes
#14

I’m glad we got a post about this. I hope our major concerns can be addressed, like ability to move the bubble, push to talk, and muting API.

26 Likes
#15

Hi,

While I appreciate this post and that new audio APIs are coming out, it really doesn’t really provide any additional information. Here’s a much shorter summary of this post:

Hi developers, we’re still working on Voice-chat APIs. This is hard because of trust-and-safety. We’re still working on this. We plan to allow you to select audio sources, add effects, and more.

Please provide more concrete future information if we’re going to get a post like this in the future. I know you can’t commit to exact times on anything, and that’s fine (actually Roblox should really just commit to things and then apologize), but I’d rather still know what is planned and when, and what risk you think could make that not happen. Stuff like:

  • When - Timeline - When are these APIs coming out? 2 weeks? 2 months? 3 months? 1 year? This can help us, as developers, plan around when these things are happening.
  • What? - What tentative capabilities are most important to Roblox? How will they work? This will let us provide additional user feedback.
  • Why? - Why does Roblox care about this stuff? What are Roblox’s goals? As users, we can align our goals to Roblox’s or explain why we don’t think Roblox’s goals are going to be useful to us.
  • Who? - Who are the goals associated with? Who are the users and what do they want. If we’re suppose to be the users, we can easily explain if a goal is aligned with ours or not.
  • How? - How will Roblox go about providing us this functionality? Here’s a great way to underline risk and let us, as users, know why Roblox may not be able to deliver.
  • Where? - Where can I expect future updates, to provide feedback, et cetera.

I assume the goal of this post was to create empathy for Roblox or something. Unless you explain stuff and provide more information we’re never going to be able to provide additional feedback, ask for changes, or even know if we’re suppose to be the target audience for this sort of update.

90 Likes
#16

I really think this is a move in the right direction, Roblox! Ever since voice chat was released, developers have really wanted an API for the service and until now, you either had no voice chat, or had it with no control over it. I also think there should be an option to give permission to the game to unmute you.

20 Likes
#17

Is this finally the sacred voice chat developer API?

19 Likes
#18

On top of this great feedback, Roblox can highlight what the community has said in previous threads. Respond to the comments where you can. There’s a lack of push to talk and basic audio sliders for global voice chat, pull it out and show how you are listening.

Feedback? - What features are the community repeatedly highlighting? How can we show that we’ve heard that feedback? How can we show we’ve adapted? Is there a focus group we could create to better understand these needs? Do you have follow up to any of these stages? Have you shared it? Does the feedback highlight that we need to release a specific feature earlier than the other?

28 Likes
#19

Yeah, a list of comment trends Roblox sees like this:

  • Requests to be able to mute and unmute people at turn
  • Ability to detect if voicechat is enabled
  • Ability to detect when someone is talking

Would let us know if our feedback got included or not. Otherwise feedback cycle looks more like this:

Roblox: We hear you.

Users: Cool. Here’s the same 10 things we want.

Roblox: We hear you

Users: Cool. Here’s the same 10 things we want

Roblox: Here’s what we made

Users: Surprised Pikachu Face - That’s not what we asked for!

Roblox: Surprised Pikachu Face

68 Likes
#20

Myself and countless others have received false VC bans, and Roblox refuses to provide any reason for the ban. The ban note has no reason, and appeals team refuses to even review it. This is unacceptable. I am positive I did not break community standards, the fact that no one at Roblox cares when I report this serious moderation exploit is really saddening.

More Here:

Please fix this now

36 Likes