Adding to the good tips above, a few more things that made text blips feel less robotic for me:
- Don't blip on every character. Play a sound every 2nd or 3rd letter, skip spaces and punctuation, and add a short pause at commas and full stops. That alone makes it read like speech rhythm instead of a typewriter.
- Pick from 3 to 5 slightly different pitches per character instead of repeating one tone, and keep each blip short (under about 50 ms) with a few milliseconds of fade-in so it doesn't click.
- Use a softer waveform than a raw square: a sine plus a little of the 3rd and 5th harmonic, or a triangle, then low-pass it.
- Give each speaker a fixed base pitch and timbre, so the voice tells you who is talking.
- For settings: a separate "Dialogue voice" volume slider (or an on/off toggle) next to SFX, so players can keep sound effects but turn the voices down.
If you want something to compare against, my free Cozy UI SFX Lite has a few soft text blips you can drop in: https://yetiancai.itch.io/cozy-ui-sfx-free-lite
Disclosure: I'm the creator of that pack. Sounds are synthesized by code written with AI assistance. AI tool: Grok Bot coding assistant (used only to write the synthesis code; current version as of Oct 2026).