Voicemod Key brings voice changing and sound cards to Xbox and PlayStation

Popular voice-changing software Voicemod will finally work with gaming consoles like PS5, Xbox Series X, and Nintendo Switch. Although Voicemod has been available as an app on Windows PCs for over five years, platform limitations have forced Voicemod to create dedicated hardware to bring its popular voice changer and sound card to game consoles.

Voice Mod Key is a small USB-C dongle that turns your regular gaming headset and cell phone into a voice changer and sound card for game consoles, phones and tablets. “The original idea came from the community, we found it on YouTube”, explains Voicemod’s director of operations, 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 inside their headphones to make the voice changer work with their phones and consoles. One person even rigged up a bunch of audio splitters that fed a microphone output into the Voicemod and then fed back into the microphone input on a console. “They put it together and I thought, I need to try this! That was the initial idea, and with the splitter you encounter problems and to solve them we needed electronic components”, says Doppelhammer.

The Voicemod Switch works by using two audio jacks and a USB-C port to route your gaming headset to the Voicemod app on your phone and back to your console. You plug your wired headset into one port, a stereo cable into the other, and then plug the other end of the stereo cable into your game console. The dongle is then plugged into your phone’s USB-C or Lightning port, where you can launch voice-changing or sound card features.

Voicemod’s AI voices and real-time voice changing features will be available, along with buttons to launch custom soundboard audio that your friends will hear in a group chat. Voicemod is also planning to make its core hardware work with voice chat apps on a phone in the future. Voicemod will turn your Key dongle into a virtual device for audio to play and any iOS or Android app will receive the modified voice change audio 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 solve a software restriction on closed platforms like iOS, Xbox, PlayStation and Switch. You can publish apps on many of these platforms, but Apple, Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo don’t allow developers to get deep access to the audio components.

I have a feeling that Voicemod Key is a solution that Doppelhammer and his team are reluctantly having to build to try to prove to platform owners that they should open and allow apps like Voicemod.

The Voicemod Key only works with wired headphones, mainly because of the way it captures and modifies audio. Proprietary solutions like Xbox Wireless won’t be supported, and Bluetooth latency would make a real-time voice changer like Voicemod a challenge. Doppelhammer says the “vast majority of our target audience” is more inclined to use wired headphones or have access to one, so he’s not too concerned about the lack of support for wireless headphones at launch.

If Voicemod could build a native app on Xbox and PlayStation consoles, the wireless issue would be resolved. “We don’t want to build our own device. This will allow for many conversations, because people will see how it works, what is needed and that there is a market”, says Doppelhammer. “This whole thing made me realize something: PC and Mac are the only platforms that are still partially open. Everything else is blocked.”

Voicemod has grown in popularity in recent years as people turn to real-time voice changing software and sound cards to be more expressive in online words like Fortnite or Roblox. Voicemod was once a niche app for Twitch streamers, but Voicemod Key aims to bring the software to people who play games Fortnite on the console or Roblox on a tablet or cell phone.

The first version of Voicemod Key, with support for console mode, will be available soon for registered beta testers. Voicemod is planning to bundle the hardware with your Voicemod Pro subscription, so you won’t need to buy it separately. The team is targeting a release later this year in the US, with a second version supporting console and mobile devices early next year.