limitations on the amount of time that a performance replica can be employed without further payment, and consent.
So games will be removed from shelves later on because the AI voice passed its expiry date and the developers didnt want to or couldnt afford to renew it? The same exact problem we have seen lately with why certain games are no longer available due to music licenses?
Well, there’s two ways you could interpret that:
- As you say, ‘shelf life’, how long they can sell the game with their voice in it
- Or, ‘voice time’, as in, contracts are negotiated in total duration of voice lines. Exceeding that number requires renegotiation.
I suspect it’s the latter as that is more similar to how voice work is already done, to my understanding.
Really seems like a recipe for disaster tbh, for voice actors in the present who won’t be paid as much, and then the games themselves once the replica license expires
It’s OK, the AI will allow companies to churn out low effort content for live service games, and the license only has to last until the game ceases to make money and the servers get shut down.
That would be ridiculous, and make generated lines even less useful than simple recordings. Presumably they mean new lines cannot be generated, past a certain date. That’d let the studio continue doing the character without needing the actor… in that game, for a while.
Why would I want a fictional character to sound like a specific real person?
Or, framing the question differently: what actor plays Dave The Diver onscreen? Because the answer is what this technology will do for audio.
There are cool use cases for this such as having NPCs say player-picked names for their character (instead of saying a generic name/title like in current RPGs). I don’t know if it’s worth it though.
Again: why would the NPC saying that need to sound like a specific real person?
To make it sound like the rest of the character’s dialogue. They’re probably not going to train this on the VA’s “normal” voice, that sounds useless.
Again: why would an NPC’s dialog need to sound like any specific real person, doing a voice?
Are you suggesting replacing voice actors with a completely computer generated voice, for all voice lines? That hasn’t sounded good ever, especially in terms of intonation and emotions.
That’s what this already does.
We are talking about a completely computer-generated voice. But for some reason we’re only talking about cases where it’s modeled as closely as possible on one specific human being.
Sure, and if it purely takes text as input and you use it to make voices for an entire game it’s going to be bad too. I’m talking about supplementing voices with snippets that they can’t know in advance, such as the player name.