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[Represent.]

Anything to save a buck. To me, this is fucked. Putting more artists out of jobs. They'd rather use fucking A.I than hire anyone else but Troy Baker. Ridiculous

Ninja Theory, other triple-A devs reportedly using AI voice acting tech over people

Update: developer Ninja Theory has clarified the use of AI voice over technology in the development of its games.

www.gamedeveloper.com

A new report from Good Luck Have Fun reveals that multiple triple-A game developers are using an AI program for voice acting in lieu of human talent. The company behind the technology is Altered AI, which contains a library of vocal performances, including around 20 professional voice actors.

Shit makes me not wanna touch Hellblade 2 tbh.

 

[Crayon]

Texture artists should be on the block sooner than later. Maybe composers after that. This is the monkey paw for our shorter dev cycles.

 

[Represent.]

Texture artists should be on the block sooner than later. Maybe composers after that. This is the monkey paw for our shorter dev cycles.

I'd understand using AI voices for a massive open world games like GTA 6 for NPC pedestrians (even though its still scummy).. But for a cinematic game thats story driven with a bunch of cutscenes like Hellblade 2 this is insane to me

 

[DeepEnigma]

You'll own nothing and like it. Even your own voice.

 

[MrTroubleMaker]

There a bunch of studio that use ai voice during development, but the final release they use actual people. Don't know if that game reviewer realize this.

 

[M1chl]

Well I don't know if it's for the growl of enemies in Hellblade, I don't think that's a problem. If, however in story based games where Ai talks instead of real people, then it's fucked.

 

[Gudji]

The gamepass effect...

 

[ChorizoPicozo]

This practice (A.I. generated content) is going to increase exponentially in the next generations. And is not even a joke.

The silver lighting would be:

1. Creation and release of even bigger worlds faster. (Than creating everything by humans)

2. Less mindless works for artist.

3. More bullshit content for GaaS.

 

[elliot5]

You don’t even know what extent ninja theory is using this… it’s mostly for in dev iteration it seems not real character voices.

 

[SlimySnake]

Thats fucked up. Hellblade is no longer an indie game being made by 20 devs and self published by an independent developer. They are now owned by a $2 trillion company that just spent $75 billion on acquisition. They should not be trying to save a buck or two.

This is a good thing but only for dev studios with just 2-3 employees like the FTL devs. Even they hired a guy to do all the music.

 

[Games of Today]

You don’t even know what extent ninja theory is using this… it’s mostly for in dev iteration it seems not real character voices.

They probably use it for placeholder voice overs so animators and level designers can have something to work with before the voice actors complete their recordings.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Can't wait to hear the new Borderlands Ai voices yelling at me.

 

[Dr.Morris79]

 

[Fbh]

Depends how they are using it.
I think it could be useful for those side conversations that NPCs have among themselves in towns, or things like grunts and screams which voice actors seem to hate anyway.

Sadly, eventually it will be used for more than that.

This practice (A.I. generated content) is going to increase exponentially in the next generations. And is not even a joke.

The silver lighting would be:

1. Creation and release of even bigger worlds faster. (Than creating everything by humans)

2. Less mindless works for artist.

3. More bullshit content for GaaS.

Gaming executives thinking about no 3:

 

[MikeM]

Another job beginning to bite the dust. Can’t wait for the future robot economy.

 

[kruis]

Video Showcase

Check out what people created with Altered Studio Voice AI. Its Text-To-Speech and Speech-To-Speech technology generates realistic and natural sounding AI voices.

www.altered.ai

 

[.Pennywise]

AI voice is the future.

Have you seen the Beckham voice video AI? The dude would speak in his native tongue while the AI would make his voice work on every language.

Just imagine you won't have voice actors with a shitty voice in your native language but instead the real voice in your language (ANY language).

It's the real deal in the future, and get used to it, just like every other human job getting replaced by a machine.

 

[RiccochetJ]

I mean this statement out of the article makes it not seem so bad:

"When you have a dialogue, you have a level of imagination. But when you take the dialogue to the voice actors, it comes back and doesn’t sound as dynamic as you wanted it to," explained Agiomyrgiannakis. "We provide an intermediate step where they can prototype the dialogue and have a checkpoint before they hit the studio.”

So basically they can have a good idea of how they want the dialogue to sound like before they go into the recording studio with the actors and reduce studio time and money with the amount of takes. Sort of the same thing with how studios may mock up scenes in Unreal Engine before they do it with live actors so they have a good idea before they spend a whole bunch of money doing reshoots.

Note: I'm saying Unreal Engine because that's an example that's what they did in the latest "The Boys" season. The Youtube video does have gore as it's them talking about how they accomplished some of their more nasty effects.


Could it be more nefarious than that? Absolutely. But at least what they say above does sound reasonable from one aspect of prototyping before they actually go into the recording studio and can relay to the actors, "This is how I would like the dialogue to sound."

 

[Gambit2483]

Damn shame if true....YongYea is not pleased...

 

[skit_data]

We really are approaching the technological singularity aren’t we? And just as expected humans will be expendable.

 

[quest]

I mean this statement out of the article makes it not seem so bad:


So basically they can have a good idea of how they want the dialogue to sound like before they go into the recording studio with the actors and reduce studio time and money with the amount of takes. Sort of the same thing with how studios may mock up scenes in Unreal Engine before they do it with live actors so they have a good idea before they spend a whole bunch of money doing reshoots.

Note: I'm saying Unreal Engine because that's an example that's what they did in the latest "The Boys" season. The Youtube video does have gore as it's them talking about how they accomplished some of their more nasty effects.


Could it be more nefarious than that? Absolutely. But at least what they say above does sound reasonable from one aspect of prototyping before they actually go into the recording studio and can relay to the actors, "This is how I would like the dialogue to sound."

Sounds reasonable to me basically a template for actors to help them in the studio so they are not going back and forth with the director to get the tone right of a scene.

 

[Hoppa]

Shit makes me not wanna touch Hellblade 2 tbh.

 

[Black_Stride]

The Ascent is almost fully voice acted.
No way a team that small manages that without this technology.

Games like Outerworlds also probably wouldnt realistically be able to have every NPC be voice acted and have the game completed in time.

Dont expect AAA games to have main characters be AI acted, but smaller studios trying to do bigger projects are gonna be jumping at this tech.

 

[Kamina]

 

[ManaByte]

And the AI will still sound like Troy Baker.

 

[jakinov]

Anything to save a buck. To me, this is fucked. Putting more artists out of jobs. They'd rather use fucking A.I than hire anyone else but Troy Baker. Ridiculous

http://[URL]https://www.gamedevelop...rtedly-using-ai-voice-acting-tech-over-people

[/URL]



Shit makes me not wanna touch Hellblade 2 tbh.

If the results are the same or better why not? Game companies don’t exist to artificially create jobs, they exist to create games. If we didn’t innovate technology because of the fear of people not having jobs we would have greatly stiffled technological advancement and wouldn’t be close to where we are today. The reality is when jobs become less needed and obsolete there becomes more demand for other jobs. There’s a shit ton of shortages for a bunch of other jobs.

 

[March Climber]

This progression in tech will be very helpful for the next Elder Scrolls game. Now even if they hire 7 voice actors like they did with Skyrim, at least every character won't have a 1 in 7 chance of sounding just like the person you just spoke to.

 

[Punished Miku]

I dont really have a moral issue with this if the quality is there. Hellblade is all about crazy lady close ups so I'm sure she is still doing her lines. Anyone important is.

 

[Knightime_X]

Probably used for NPC characters with no real role.
Like bystanders.
AI could make thousands of conversations that would be extremely expensive and a very long time to finish the traditional way.
Even monsters. :O

 

[Killer8]

An actor should know what they're getting into when they license their work to one of these AI companies. When you give consent for the company to do what they please with your work, you can't exactly act like shocked Pikachu when they do just that. It's like a texture artist for Quixel freaking out when a random game uses his texture from the Quixel Megascans library. I fail to really see the 'ethical' issue.

 

[nemiroff]

It's funny how most people in this thread didn't read the article. The article itself is agenda driven for clicks as fuck and deliberately give an impression that might not be as it seems. We have absolutely no idea how this tech is used, if at all ending up in any game by reading this article alone, only that it might be used by some for assistance during development.

 

[Kokoloko85]

Pretty lame. But would be good for games like Elder Scrolls and huge open worlds to give voices to the random NPC no1 cares about

 

[SenjutsuSage]

There a bunch of studio that use ai voice during development, but the final release they use actual people. Don't know if that game reviewer realize this.

Was going to suggest this. The literal main character of Hellblade is a real woman using her real voice lmao.

 

[Raven77]

REPLACE INSECT WITH COMPUTER then start laughing real hard.

 

[kruis]

AI is going to take the jobs of artists, voice actors,

An actor should know what they're getting into when they license their work to one of these AI companies. When you give consent for the company to do what they please with your work, you can't exactly act like shocked Pikachu when they do just that. It's like a texture artist for Quixel freaking out when a random game uses his texture from the Quixel Megascans library. I fail to really see the 'ethical' issue.

It's the same with sample libraries. Almost all of the orchestral soundtracks in video games were made using orchestral sample libraries because the real thing is too expensive (unless you're Sony). Companies specializing in creating sample libraries pay musicians, string sections or entire orchestras to play single notes for them in all kinds of different ways so those samples can be used later to replace those musicians, string sections and orchestras. That's how it works.

 

[kruis]

It's funny how most people in this thread didn't read the article. The article itself is agenda driven for clicks as fuck and deliberately give an impression that might not be as it seems. We have absolutely no idea how this tech is used, if at all ending up in any game by reading this article alone, only that it might be used by some for assistance during development.

This technology has already been used in real games.

 

[Del_X]

Didn't voice actors unionize? I guess this is the fruit of that endeavor.

 

[Three]

I've been asking for speech synthesis in games for a while but I didn't really take into consideration the jobs of the voice actors. I was thinking more realtime on local hardware to save space and have more variety :

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/spee...-whats-happened-to-it.1627793/#post-265376894

 

[DaGwaphics]

There a bunch of studio that use ai voice during development, but the final release they use actual people. Don't know if that game reviewer realize this.

I was going to say, the article makes it sounds like this is for blocking in.

 

[SteelCurtain 59]

Any job that can be done by computers, will eventually be taken over by computers

 

[DaGwaphics]

I've been asking for speech synthesis in games for a while but I didn't really take into consideration the jobs of the voice actors. I was thinking more realtime on local hardware to save space and have more variety :

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/spee...-whats-happened-to-it.1627793/#post-265376894

Fully synthesized speech would be a game changer for large open worlds. Think of the variety in conversations etc. that could be encountered, vs. hearing the same things over and over again like we generally do.

And then you still have the primary voices voiced by real actors.

 

[UnNamed]

AI will eventually replace 3D artists making 3d environments in the same way AI can now generate 2d images from words.
And generate beats to mimic a sound style.
And replace voices.

Next next-gen games will be only about game mechanics and few other things.

 

[eastcoastkody]

better than hearing the same 4 ppl that they hire for every game. And its not like cartoons where those ppl at least can do differenct voices and accents.

 

[Gamer_By_Proxy]

You literally can't make this stuff up. Right after the first game got so much praise and awards for it's voice acting from the woman that wasn't even a professional voice actor . . .

 

[Gamer_By_Proxy]

This technology has already been used in real games.

"I need someone of your stature to talk to them close fuckers." haha

So I guess this tech is for voices that are harder to understand and have zero perception of pacing?

 

[Beechos]

Sounds good to me. If it shortens dev time and allows budget to go toward other things. Aslos me have a resident cheese slider.

 

[01011001]

if this will give us really convincing text to speech that can pronounce custom character names really well then I'm all for it!

also voice acting in games is overrated anyways.
the most loved VAs are not even good all things considered.
like Hater's Snake voice, he has the depth of a dried up puddle and the emotional pallet of a cricket, but people love him me included

 

[CuNi]

I'll never understand the sentiment of crying for something to be banned because it'll put some industry out of business.
With that attitude, we'd still be in the Middle Ages and people would copy books by writing them down.

Times move forward and yes, I understand it sucks to be cut out by a machine, but that's progress.
The only thing I'd say is only fair is that there should be a tax or percentage that a company has to pay when they replace humans with AI at first, so that those people can get financial support for like 3-5 months while searching other fields they could work in, but I am against completely banning AI in any field because of the reason "but think of the people!"

 

[PSYGN]

"I need someone of your stature to talk to them close fuckers." haha

So I guess this tech is for voices that are harder to understand and have zero perception of pacing?

Some parts sound weird but probably because I was listening for it.

 

[LiquidMetal14]

Cool