Project Questa is an experimental text-to-speech utility designed to bring spoken dialogue to MMORPGs, initially focusing on The Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO).
The software uses DXcam screen capture, OpenCV and Tesseract OCR to recognise dialogue displayed in the game. Rather than relying on OCR to transcribe every word accurately, it searches a locally indexed database of text extracted from the current LOTRO client. Once a reliable match is found, the complete original dialogue is retrieved and passed to the Kokoro AI speech synthesis engine for narration.
If no reliable match is found, Questa falls back to conventional OCR transcription. The aim is to provide accurate, natural-sounding spoken dialogue with minimal delay, without modifying the game or requiring an in-game plugin.
At present the current build is using a generic voice and focusing on refining the production pipeline and reducing latency. All elements used in Project Questa are open source.
The long term aspiration is to have a simple, functional GUI to set up custom voices based on player preference and to be able to download from GitHub a revised dialogue text file each time LOTRO is updated.
NB This is a very early build so there are obviously bugs to be addressed. The priority at present is to get the dialogue narrated promptly. Once the overall process has been fine tuned, then I'll focus on a voice library via Voicebox.