New World Notes has dug up some stats from the middleware company which provides Second Life’s voice chat facility, Vivox, on the use of voice within the virtual world. The headline figure is an increase from 30% of Second Life residents using voice at the time of last year’s Virtual Worlds Forum, to 50% today. That’s a significant increase, and reflects a perhaps surprising willingness of SL residents to move away from the traditional text chat.
Even more interesting, I think, is the fact that unique daily users of voice is up almost 100% in the same period. That suggests that the availability of voice is a feature which SL users are finding increasingly valuable; this is not a gimmick that is occasionally fun to use, but a standard method of communication adopted and regularly used by many millions of Second Lifers.
The adoption of voice has notable implications for the future of virtual worlds. First, virtual worlds become more like the real world. When a person speaks, using their voice, over the VoIP system in Second Life, that is the voice of the real person, not the avatar. The avatar becomes an instrument of the person’s ‘real’ identity, and virtual worlds become a tool rather than a destination in themselves. This will please those who seek to use virtual worlds in enterprise; that use case sees avatars and virtual worlds as simply a method of communication, rather than the immersive ‘metaverse’ other from reality.
The second implication of the growing importance of voice in virtual worlds is on brand presences. Might it become necessary for brands to put together a ‘virtual world call centre’ to handle communication with in-world users? On the one hand, if that expectation existed, it would add to the cost of establishing a presence, due to the need to train and establish systems – as well as presenting a risk of irritating users. However, it could provide an effective way of hard selling to users: something which we have not yet seen on a wide scale from brand presences in virtual worlds, and which would likely be an unwelcome addition from the point of view of the consumer.
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