What are the odds that the announcer will say your Mii's name at the victory screen?

[The Drilling Juggernaut]

It's doable: have the announcer say each phonic sound, let players pick through the sounds, assign a specific sound to your Mii, then at the victory screen the announcer says their name. it won't be perfect, but it'll sound a lot better then "This games winner is...MII FIGHTER!"

So, you think it will happen?

 

[Ryan.]

That would be awesome. I really hope they do this, but I'm not sure if they will.

 

[Mario & Sonic Guy]

Pretty much 0%. That would require multiple voice clips for names that don't always make sense.

 

[Fastblade5035]

inb4THEWINNERIS... I C U P!

 

[Erotic&Heretic]

This could work in Japanese. But when it comes to european names (like norvegian names, for example), it's gonna be a lot more complex.

So I guess MAYBE in the japanese version.

 

[The Drilling Juggernaut]

I guess I should add this in the OP.

It's not pronouncing a name, the announcer's voice actor would record those phonic sounds, then the player could string the sounds together to make a name, then assign that name to a Mii. So you can make whatever name you want with the sounds, like "MMM RRR EEE OOHH" and the announcer will say it "MARIO!" at the result screen.There a 44 total.

[collapse=Phonic alphabet]

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It won't sound perfect, but I'm sure most people would be okay with the small mistakes it would make.

 

[Erimir]

I actually just finished up a degree in language technologies, so I know quite a bit about speech synthesis.

The short answer is: Not a chance.

The long answer is:

1. Each language has its own set of phones (language sounds). Even just between English, Japanese, French and Spanish, they have a lot of sounds to include. It's doable, of course. Google Translate's speech synthesis is great. But yeah, you have to do each language separately.
2. But Google Translate only does one voice per language because you need recordings of a real person. Google is likely doing a unit selection system, which sounds great but requires hours of recorded data from the "voice actor" who is recording for you. So either they use an off-the-shelf, accept a lower quality synthesis using a less data-intensive method, or they have a significant amount of work for this to get it to sound the way they want.
3. Speech synthesis is really bad at proper names... Especially in a language like English where the spelling system is stupid. Common ones are of course learned, but if you want it to be able to pronounce any random name, you need to allow people to tell it the pronunciation. And that's not a can of worms you want to open up, because this is a game for the public, not an education about the phonetics of English (the number of people who aren't even aware of the sound distinctions found in their own speech is quite high...). Teaching people IPA or some other form of phonemic alphabet isn't worth it.
4. Nintendo doesn't want their announcer saying "penis"

Therefore it will say Mii Fighter, or Mii Gunner, or whatever.

 

[Mypantisgone]

They could go the Armaggedon way and just say "Exellent" or something about your pick and "You win !" for the victory screen.

 

[OctiVick]

I think a likely option is that the announcer refers to the them by class:
"This game's winner is . . . BRAWLER"
"This game's winner is . . . SWORD FIGHTER"
"This game's winner is . . . GUNNER"

 

[Johnknight1]

I think a likely option is that the announcer refers to the them by class:
"This game's winner is . . . BRAWLER"
"This game's winner is . . . SWORD FIGHTER"
"This game's winner is . . . GUNNER"

Probably, but there also might be a "nickname" feature like sports games with "custom athletes" features have.

In those games, they have common names like "John", "Zack", "Ryan", "Aaron", any name a player has, etc.), and say them. And when they don't, they either say a nickname ("Houdini", "The Big", "The Giant"), the last name (specifically if another play has it, or if it is a very common last name like "Gonzalez", "Bauer", "Brady," or "Hernandez"), or just the number (I guess the equivalent would be the Player number).

 

[Erimir]

This just doesn't seem like the sort of feature that would matter to Sakurai/Nintendo.

The most you could hope for would be the announcer recognizing certain officially released Miis (e.g. Reggie and Sakurai).

 

[WritersBlah]

I just imagine them being referred to as "Mii Fighter" always. No exceptions. Phonetic sound mashing is just too much unneeded work for the devs.

 

[Erimir]

I think "Mii Gunner", "Mii Swordfighter", "Mii Brawler" etc. are possibilities.

I can't decide which is more likely. I think it's basically whether or not they get one character select slot. If they only get one, the announcer will probably say "Mii Fighter!" when you select it, so that's what he'll say when you win.

 

[Dreamking]

I think they will just say the class name.

 

[Deleted member]

Slim. Saying the class name as others have suggested makes more sense. I thought they might not have an announcer call at all, but the results screen does in fact, exist, so just calling the class name or yelling Mii. (Which would be quite funny; "The winner is...Mii!"

 

[Xigger]

If it weren't for the whole dozens of languages thing, the speech synthesis idea would be cool. Even if my friends play as ***, ****, *****, ******, and *******.

 

[Vintage Creep]

I hope at least they recorded the name for Sakurai, Iwata and Reggie.

 

[Saikyoshi]

"This game's winner is... Player two!", et cetera sounds a bit cleaner than announcing the winner by class if you ask me, but that's just me.

 

[Yakko93]

I wish, "And the winner is...... Reggie!"

 

[Sonallvegqu]

0.01% chance of that happening.

 

[Ragna22]

I doubt that because that would mean they'd have to get the announcer's voice actor to record himself saying things like "This game's winner is Sh*t head." in the event someone makes a Mii with that name.

 

[Saikyoshi]

I doubt that because that would mean they'd have to get the announcer's voice actor to record himself saying things like "This game's winner is Sh*t head." in the event someone makes a Mii with that name.

If they did it with phonetically mashing, that would come out sounding like "Sha-Theed".

That's another issue - pronunciation.

 

[Xigger]

I doubt that because that would mean they'd have to get the announcer's voice actor to record himself saying things like "This game's winner is Sh*t head." in the event someone makes a Mii with that name.

Just for your information, half of this thread is about speech synthesis, where only syllables are recorded and mixed together as words, instead of each word being recorded individually. Not that it's perfect.

 

[cmbsfm]

If they did it with phonetically mashing, that would come out sounding like "Sha-Theed".

That's another issue - pronunciation.

I have an indian name so no doubt they'll mess it up like most people.

 

[SonicMario]

I brought this up in the Mii thread before they were confirmed. But a part of me would love it if the announcer just said "This game's winner is... Mii!" because it will always sound like the Announcer is saying "This game's winner is... ME!". An announcer sounding like he's referring to himself as the winner of the match.

Though they could also do something like "This game's winner is... Mii Gunner/Swordsman/Brawler". Even if that happens though, then I suppose that's up to people who make edited audio jokes to do xD

 

[Curious Villager]

After having played Tomodachi Life, I would like to see this. They could do it where you can type the name you want and if the announcer pronounces it wrong then you can adjust that too like in that game, although I'm not exactly sure how much time and effort this would take to implement and if it would all be worth it in the end.... Seems pretty complex and all..... :/

 

[SS-bros14]

It'd be cool, but not sure if it'll happen.

 

[The Drilling Juggernaut]

Playing Tamadochi Life really makes me think this has a much better possibility of happening. Of course the voices are computer generated, but the principles are the same; enter the voice and the announcer says it. They even went the extra step of letting you put in what the name is supposed to sound like, so if the computer doesn't pick it up you can tell the game how it's supposed to be pronounced. The writing of the name is the same, but the announcer still says it correctly. They also have words you can not enter, which eliminates the fear of Nintendo having a character with the name like "penis" in smash bros.

I still don't think it will happen but it could happen. Tamadochi Life showed exactly how it could be done.

 

[Brickbuild101]

Playing Tamadochi Life really makes me think this has a much better possibility of happening. Of course the voices are computer generated, but the principles are the same; enter the voice and the announcer says it. They even went the extra step of letting you put in what the name is supposed to sound like, so if the computer doesn't pick it up you can tell the game how it's supposed to be pronounced. The writing of the name is the same, but the announcer still says it correctly. They also have words you can not enter, which eliminates the fear of Nintendo having a character with the name like "penis" in smash bros.

I still don't think it will happen but it could happen. Tamadochi Life showed exactly how it could be done.

*Tomodachi.

 

[Skyblade12]

I'm apparently the only person who wants to hear the announcer shout:
"This game's winner is... Miiiiiiiiiii!"
The poor announcer doesn't get enough love, let him win a match or two.

 

[SonicMario]

I'm apparently the only person who wants to hear the announcer shout:
"This game's winner is... Miiiiiiiiiii!"
The poor announcer doesn't get enough love, let him win a match or two.

This is now confirmed. And you're not the only one. I love that he says that xD

 

[Curious Villager]

Who is the voice actor of that announcer? Then we can make a Mii of him and then really make him look special. :3

 

[SonicMario]

Who is the voice actor of that announcer? Then we can make a Mii of him and then really make him look special. :3

His name is Xander Mobus. Here's two images of him.

 

[Curious Villager]

His name is Xander Mobus. Here's two images of him.

Oh, he looks younger than I thought. But pretty cool to know.

 

[The Drilling Juggernaut]

Welp, it would have been cool but it's not that big of a deal.

 

[Erimir]

Well, it's definitely not saying people's names, that's confirmed. I don't think we've seen how it does it in the American release for sure. Probably it will say the same thing considering the announcer uses English in the Japanese version. But it's possible that the NA localization team will decide that for native English speakers "The winner is me!" sounds too silly. There have been some differences between the Japanese and English language versions even when it's using English (e.g. "Game!" vs. "Game set!", "Time!" vs. "Time up!"). I would prefer it if it said "Mii Brawler" or whatever, but it looks like it's probably going to be "Mii".

As to why that is... Well, Tomodachi Life has speech synthesis, so Nintendo has done it before. I didn't realize that earlier.

But the Tomodachi Life speech synthesis is lower quality. Like I said, right now good speech synthesis (like Google Translate for large languages) that sounds almost natural is very data intensive, requiring hours of recorded speech. But lower quality can be much much cheaper as far as computer resources. This is ok for Tomodachi Life, they're going for a quirky feel, so it doesn't feel out of place, and having it be able to say the names of Miis provides a lot more benefit to that game than it does for Smash.

Sakurai would've wanted it to sound like the announcer, not the computer-sounding voices in TL. Getting it to sound good and not really jarring compared to the announcer for other characters would be much more data intensive than the synthesis in Tomodachi Life. It is also less essential to the game than it is for TL.

As a side note, profanity censors aren't that hard to get around in things like that. Since it says the words, you just need to come up with something that's pronounced the same way. Such as naming a character "Peeniss" or "Peenuss" or something along those lines. Adding apostrophes between syllables or h's after vowels is an easy way since they will end up unpronounced, so use "suhck" for example. Apply to whatever swear words you like.

 

[D-Mac]

Oh, he looks younger than I thought. But pretty cool to know.

Here's a fun fact: He's 22, and may very well be the youngest actor in the entire game. Pit's actor is few months older than him.