i am aware the vc dev api is coming its just been getting rolled in and out way too much
As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to do anything with voice chat since it’s API appears to be closed access.
Until it was rolled in, the use of the FFlag VoiceChatApiSecurityCheck allowed you to access them within Studio, but again, its not that useful.
This includes hiding the chat bubble, changing the source of where voice data is emitted from or adding custom GUIs that react to a user’s voice state.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because we would be able to use voice chat much more freely and give us proper customisation over the system.
Seems as of late that plans for voice chat API are on the backburner, due to the absence of related announcements. I’ve searched around and can’t find any new API features at the time of writing this.
Immersion is a crucial aspect of voice chat which tends to be overlooked. However experiences can’t be fine-tuned for optimal immersion without extensive voicechat API.
A use-case I wanted to implement just now was stealth gameplay involving hostile NPC tracking the playbackloudness of individuals utilizing voicechat and the NPC reacting upon certain loudness thresholds being exceeded, but there’s no API to leverage.
Aside from that practical example, I can imagine the absence of extensive voice chat API drastically limiting the development of other new player content on the platform, either in the form of games, features or/and minigames built around voicechat.
I don’t know if this is related but it would have so much creative potential it if Roblox gave more than just loudness. If Roblox can give us some sort of frequency/pitch data (preferably the loudest 5 frequencies) it would spark so many new games (such as karaoke, and many unique games that does with sound). Here’s a great game example on what you can achieve:
It’s been nearly a year since I made this thread initially and no progress towards a developer usable API has been made.
Its also annoying not being able to force mute people from scripts for moderation purposes, lets say a kid is screaming or playing not ok audio through their microphone, I should be able to “force mute” their microphone so that no audio data is sent.
The mysterious VoiceSource and Speaker objects remain unimplemented and cannot be used. Being able to change emission source is another feature that would take voice chat beyond being locked to player heads.
Even if progress is being made, it is yet to be seen as no new VoiceChat APIs have been pushed to the API dump.
I’d absolutely need the ability to mute / change volume / apply SoundGroup effects to player’s output for its use in my game, for scenarios where the player is incapacitated, or in a separate room next door and needs to be muffled.
Much like asset privacy, we likely will never hear about this again
On a real note, I’m becoming concerned with the lack of communication about these essential features that have been sidelined, the more and more stuff put on the back burner, the greater the backlog of API content that we don’t have access to. For what, what are they doing with their time? We should have had access to this API within months of the feature being announced, I don’t get what the deal is.
Very similar to videos, this may never happen. I feel like Roblox is going to keep this locked off for a while, mainly due to privacy reasons. Changing the source of voice might be a privacy risk so we definitely won’t see that coming anytime soon. Also you must remember it is still in Beta (although I’m not sure why it still is) which already implies that not all features are released.
I do hope that this API gets released some day, it will definitely be a great addition and inspire many new types of games. But for now, we can only keep dreaming.
I think this shows a major procrastination issue at Roblox. To my knowledge, none of the features that were announced in the past few years that were promised ‘further functionality in the future’, actually received their added functionality… On top of this, VoiceChat API (unlike videos) is something you can’t attempt to re-create in Studio due to it’s nature. Roblox appears to be placing ‘creating new features’ on-top of ‘making these features use-ful for developers’, this is only an assumption however my personal belief is that while the press will talk about the former, they won’t talk about the latter.
Can we please have voice-chat API, for the past year I’ve been doing complex-math to acheive the result I want as-well as having to focus on voice-chat as a main game feature rather than drag-and-dropping it in. There have been times in-where I’ve thought about moving voice-chat in my game over to a different platform because Roblox is currently making it a pain to work with.
That’s only if Voice Chat is implemented in a way that isn’t held together with ducktape, rubber bands, and chewing gum. At this point I suspect the reason why the API hasn’t been released is that the whole system is so full of hard limits and edge case bugs that prevent it from having any sort of ability for devs to do cool stuff that we want.
Not to mention the fact that their moderation pipeline is completely nonfunctional. It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that VC was extremely rushed and not at all ready for full rollout.
