Okay, so, in man and machine, there is a tranducer cyberware, and an external unit. Both are supposed to be able to take mental impulses from the user's brain (eitehr through a datajack, or connected to the brain through a router or some ports) and convert that into the equivilent of a streaming audio feed. You can then connect this to a radio or something to transmit that to your buddies, where on the other end it comes out as intelligable speech.

Does this mean that the voice sounds like your character's voice normally sounds? or like a crappy robotic voice like that guy from south park? or what?

Secondly, it says two characters with trandsducers can connect them to one another and "speak" mind-to-mind. Does this mean that transducers can work in reverse? taking a stream of audio data, and converting it into the brain's representation of their meaning? Does this allow communication dispite language barriers? COuld it be used to convert the rest of hte team's radio discussion into mental signals (or to text, as it says it can do so) dispite the fact that their voices are all different?

I assume that if hte thing has its own "voice" that sort of robotic sounding, that all transducers would sound alike, and converting back wouldn't be difficult, but otherwise wouldn't this unit have to be able to pick up any voice pattern, apick out indivisual sounds and form words out of them, and then eitehr transmit the text or the mental impulses of those words to the user?

We've always played that the connection maintains voice quality and that it works both ways (microphone and speakers, as it were). Language barriers still exist because the transducer isn't a "mind dump" that feeds everything in your consciousness into radiowaves (if it was, it would be useless as a communication tool. Giving orders would be like reciting Finnegan's Wake), but rather characters have to think the phrase or sentence they're sending. This is to say you can't radio someone the memory of your mom singing lullabyes or the smell of roses, just the lyrics to the song or descriptive words about roses. You can justify this with whatever pseudo-science you like, such as by saying that the transducer is wired into the language center of the brain.

Thanks. That's pretty much how I would expect them to work... except that it seems wierd that the tool can convert things into a voice that sounds just like your real one without being able to imitate otehr's voices just as easily.

I thought that maybe you'd have to "train" it by speaking normally, and letting it record various things.. .but then it wouldn't help people who can't speak... and the voice modulation cyberware that covers recording patterns and mimicing them is very expensive (way more than a transducer)....

But, yeah, I guess RPG science could allow your mind to have a sort of "mental idea" of what it should sound like.

perhaps it works similar to a matrix icon, YOU, as the user, personafy what you want to sound like.

The main reason we play it like that is to allow it to function on a level with the subvocal mike/subdermal speakers (which seem to be equivalent, if inferior, gear), without making is a super-powerful universal translator.

If you want to give it more flavor or detail, hook it up with an image link, so it scrolls like an IM window in the corner of the char's vision. Or you could say that the transducer has a couple dozen stock voice patterns programmed into it and you can assign each incoming radio channel to a different pattern (chars could fight over who gets channel "Jake Steel" and who gets channel "Lisping Sal"). Or each transducer is programmed with the char's own voice pattern and this is encoded when its transmitted. Other transducers recognize the coding and play back accordingly. Whatever floats yer boat.

ROFL. Lisping Sal... priceless