Stream Deck soundboard with your own voice lines
Stream Deck has a built-in soundboard: press a key and it plays an audio file. Beyond stock sound effects, you can fill it with spoken lines, such as a game announcer’s “Critical hit!”, a cartoon character’s catchphrase or your own trained voice.
This guide follows Elgato’s own instructions for the Soundboard and shows how to make the voice clips with the free SuperClonica engine.
Add a sound to a key
In the Stream Deck app, drag the Soundboard’s Play Audio action onto a key and choose your audio file. Elgato lists MP3, WAV, FLAC and M4A as compatible and recommends WAV or FLAC: WAV is uncompressed, so playback needs fewer resources, while MP3 has to be decoded first, which can raise CPU use and cause small hitches when a sound starts.
Playback settings
Each key has an action mode: Play/Stop, Play/Overlap, Play/Restart or Loop/Stop. You can fade in, fade out or both over 1 to 5 seconds, set the volume and choose a specific output device for the sound. For short voice lines, Play/Restart lets you fire the same line again instantly, and Play/Overlap suits rapid-fire meme sounds.
Play sounds through your mic in Discord
To send soundboard sounds into Discord, meetings or game chat, Elgato says Wave Link is required. Its guide uses the free Wave Link 3.0 on Windows or macOS: create a channel for Stream Deck, add your microphone as a channel, switch both into the mix you need, such as Chat Mix, then in Discord open Settings, Voice & Video and pick that mix, for example Chat Mix (Elgato Virtual Audio), as the input device. Turn off Discord’s noise suppression, which can filter out sounds that are not your voice.
Make spoken clips
Hear voices free on their pages with a line of 30 to 100 characters, no account needed, and download the recording. For a full board, buy a voice once, download its file and install the free engine with python -m pip install superclonica-cpu, then voice each line: superclonica --text "Critical hit!" --voice voice.json --lang en --normalize --output critical-hit.wav. The engine writes WAV, the format Elgato recommends, and --normalize keeps every key at the same loudness.
Ideas for a voice board
Popular boards mix a game announcer for wins and fails, a narrator for scene changes, a few character catchphrases and your own trained voice for greetings and sign-offs, made once in the studio from a 5 to 10 second recording. Character voices in the catalog are fan-made, for fan works, parody and personal use; do not use a voice to pretend to be a real person.