TwitchSpeaks

TwitchSpeaks is a Twitch channel providing live text-to-speech of the TwitchPlaysPokemon chat via voice synthesis. Commands, ads, URLs, and the like are filtered out, leaving only the sometimes happy, sometimes frustrated, occasionally offensive, but often funny sounds of the hivemind. Messages are read individually, and separated by a short pause. The fully-automated channel is up 24/7. It is not run by the TwitchPlaysPokemon streamer.

The channel is meant to be a simple audio supplement for TPP, a way to monitor the hivemind without having to keep up with a fast-moving chat.


 * With the exceptions of Twitch's built-in *** censoring, which is replaced with a bleep sound, and removal of emotes and unicode, the messages spoken by TwitchSpeaks are totally unedited, and as such can at times be extraordinarily profane, racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive. The channel is therefore intended only for a mature audience.

Human Mode
"Human Mode" is a regularly occurring event on the TwitchSpeaks channel during which a TPP player and/or live updater reads the TPP chat aloud using his/her own voice in place of the usual text-to-speech synthesizer. Each session typically runs for one hour, and is followed by an "Open Mic" night, during which anybody in the TeamSpeak server  can be broadcast live on TwitchSpeaks. Various chat-interactive video games and a "TPP Narrates" session, in which the TwitchSpeaks chat provides alternative narration for a short video by way of text-to-speech voice synthesis, are also commonly included.

Past games include Five Nights At Freddy's, Grand Theft Auto 3, Zork, QWOP, and the popular MUD Aardwolf. TPP has also been handed control of a virtual machine running Windows 7. Past TPP Narrates videos include 1950's educational films (e.g. "Mind Your Manners"), a Jeopardy episode, a music video, a driver's ed instructional video, an animal documentary, a presidential debate, and others.

flockdraw.com/twitchspeaks is also typically shown live on-stream during these events.

More details & speaker sign-up info

Aissurteivos' recordings of past Human Mode speakers, chat included

Videos of past TPP Narrates events

Past Gen Replays
Prior to TPP's Pokemon X playthrough, TwitchSpeaks would typically replay text-to-speech logs of major events in TwitchPlaysPokemon history (with associated command/phrase stats) when the main TPP stream is offline, disabled, or broken for a lengthy period, and also during the intermission between games. This has been replaced with regularly occurring Human Modes.

Version 2.0
TwitchSpeaks version 2.0 was released on April 26th 2014. The audio (TTS) is unchanged, but the video content now shows the latest Reddit update, spoken message history, and various TPP chat statistics. A small embedded minigame occasionally is included, which accepts commands from either the TwitchSpeaks or TPP chat.

CTS (chat-to-speech) mode on main TPP stream
On March 29th 2014, during the Pokemon Emerald run, the TPP streamer introduced a new feature in which his own custom text-to-speech system would briefly speak selected chat messages in a manner similar to TwitchSpeaks, but with the fundamental difference that the messages were overlapped, whereas TwitchSpeaks reads them individually in a sequence.

Since then, the voices have returned from time to time for brief spells before disappearing again.

On April 16th 2014 the voices returned, they ended shortly before voting was enabled the next day.

Generation 3.5
CTS mode was re-enabled on April 19th 2014 at which a new feature was added to FireRed. The TPP in-house chat program would automatically activate every other hour, on the hour, and when it did a countdown would start showing the amount of time until it is disabled and whose comments were being spoken at that moment.

It was later changed so that the amount of time between each CTS period & the amount of time it lasts for is randomized from anywhere from 10 to 100 minutes.