Popular voice changing software Voicemod will finally work with game consoles like PS5, Xbox Series X and Nintendo Switch. Although Voicemod has been available as an application for Windows PCs for over five years, platform limitations forced Voicemod to create dedicated hardware to bring its popular voice changer and soundboard to game consoles.
The Voicemod Key is a small USB-C dongle that turns your regular gaming headset and mobile phone into a voice changer and soundboard for gaming consoles, phones and tablets. “The original idea was from the community, we found it on YouTube,” explains Voicemod COO Jochen Doppelhammer in an interview with On the edge.
Voicemod can’t create an app for Xbox or PlayStation, so Voicemod users have been using headphones to make the voice changer work with their phones and consoles. One guy even put together a bunch of audio splitters that fed the mic output to the Voicemod and then back to the console’s mic input. “They put it together and I was like, I have to try this! That was the original idea, and with a splitter you find problems and to solve them we needed electronic components,” says Doppelhammer.
The Voicemod Key works by using two audio jacks and a USB-C port to route your gaming headset to the Voicemod app on a mobile device and back to your console. You plug your wired headphones into one port, a stereo cable into the other, and then connect the other end of the stereo cable to your gaming console. The dongle then plugs into your phone’s USB-C or Lightning port, where you can launch voice-changing or soundboard features.
Voicemod’s AI voices and real-time voice changer features will be available, along with buttons to launch custom audio from the soundboard that your friends will hear in party chat. Voicemod also plans to make its Key hardware work with phone voice chat apps in the future. Voicemod will turn your Key dongle into a virtual device so that it returns sound, and any iOS or Android app will then receive the modified sound, changing the voice as if it were the real microphone. It’s similar to how Voicemod works on macOS or Windows, with virtual audio devices.
Doppelhammer and the Voicemod team had to create hardware to resolve a software limitation on closed platforms like iOS, Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch. You can publish apps to many of these platforms, but Apple, Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo don’t allow developers to get deep access to the audio components.
I feel like Voicemod Key is a solution that Doppelhammer and team reluctantly have to build to try to prove to platform owners that they should open and allow apps like Voicemod.
Voicemod Key will only work with wired headphones, largely because of the way it captures audio and modifies it. Proprietary solutions like Xbox Wireless won’t be supported, and Bluetooth latency would make real-time voice switching like Voicemod a challenge. Doppelhammer says that “the majority of our target audience” is more likely to use or have access to wired headphones, so he’s not too concerned about the lack of wireless headphone support at launch.
If Voicemod manages to build its own app on Xbox and PlayStation consoles, the wireless problem will be solved. “We don’t want to create our own device. This will enable a lot of conversation because people will see how it works, what is needed and that there is a market,” says Doppelhammer. “This whole thing made me realize one thing: PC and Mac are the only platforms left that are halfway open. Everything else is locked.”
Voicemod has grown in popularity in recent years as people look to real-time voice changer software and soundboards to be more expressive online words like Fortnite or Roblox. Voicemod was once a niche app for Twitch streamers, but Voicemod Key aims to bring the software to the people who play Fortnite on the console or Roblox on a tablet or mobile phone.
The first version of Voicemod Key, with support for console mode, will soon be available to registered beta testers. Voicemod plans to bundle the hardware with its Voicemod Pro subscription, so you won’t need to buy it separately. The team is targeting a launch later this year in the US, with a second version supporting both console and mobile early next year.
