Despite involving driving cool cars at high speeds, racing can be quite a restrained sport. Regulations and sponsorship obligations usually reign in what cars can look like and how they are raced. Sim racing offers a bit of an escape where customization and creatively time to shine. Now, someone has decided to get the AI woman narrating a ton of videos on TikTok to be their spotting on iRacing.
Twitch streamer LeahNudle has created a uniquely contemporary spotter pack for iRacing, an online racing simulator. Her pack replaces your spotter with text-to-speech software commonly used on social media app TikTok. Once you get the pack installed, it is quite the juxtaposition. The voice that you become familiar with through people sharing weird stories is now telling you that car is on your right as you hurtle down a straight at 160 miles per hour.
In iRacing, the automated spotter serves the combined role of a spotter and crew chief. It will crucially let to know if a car is beside you as well as conveying other information. The spotter will inform you about your lap times, if your car is low on fuel, how well the race leader is doing, and what flags are being waved by race officials.
Having run a few races with the spotter pack, it can be a weird and funny experience at first. I also haven’t noticed any of the weird pronunciations that I commonly see in TikTok videos, but that’s probably due to the spotters’ line being fairly simple and straightforward. But it still gets the job done, and the pack probably has me paying far more attention to my spotter than I usually do. If you use iRacing, you can download LeahNudle’s TikTok AI Voice Spotter Pack on her Twitch page.