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When will we start seeing AI controlled voice acting in games

Blightor

Novice
Joined
Jul 8, 2017
Messages
32
This whole fake voice stuff that people are doing on videos and such, I wonder when some enterprising game producers (or engine makers) will start putting that into games we play.

RPGs stand-out I guess, as they should be heavy on dialogue, and the ability to have almost 0 cost voice over that caters for every optional choice and discussion tree might enable devs to go to town on how much gets written.

I can even see opportunity where the player can choose dozens of voice variations for there own character, and have them all play out through more involved dialogue. Even RPGs that have procedural characters generated could finally have fully spoken dialogue with all sorts of variation.

Its all very exciting.
 

Mustawd

Guest
I bet AI can develop some better games than some humans.

Human murder sim?


225px-Kill_all_humans.png
 

FeelTheRads

Arcane
Joined
Apr 18, 2008
Messages
13,716
Voice acting is mostly a waste of time and often a distraction.

And the more there is the more useless it is. Are you really going to sit and listen to all that text where the developers "went to town"? First, I don't know why you'd want developers "going to town" on the writing in the first place, but this would be a case where voice acting would be a distraction preventing you from properly absorbing the information in the text.
 

Blightor

Novice
Joined
Jul 8, 2017
Messages
32
Voice acting is mostly a waste of time and often a distraction.

And the more there is the more useless it is. Are you really going to sit and listen to all that text where the developers "went to town"? First, I don't know why you'd want developers "going to town" on the writing in the first place, but this would be a case where voice acting would be a distraction preventing you from properly absorbing the information in the text.
I guess I just wonder what limitation there are to dialogue trees if you have to hire voice actors. 1 million lines of dialogue might only ever result in 10 thousand lines of what you actually have spoken to you in the game because you made certain decisions.

I wonder how limited big productions are when it comes to having the unique story.
 

111111111

Guest
I mean unless you want everyone to sound like Siri and the Google assistant then you will have to wait at least 7 years.
Part of the reason people use AI is that it has to be an economic preferable alternative to humans. I doubt that we will start seeing them if at all until much later.Besides why would you want ai voice.
 

Mustawd

Guest
I mean unless you want everyone to sound like Siri and the Google assistant then you will have to wait at least 7 years.

Yah, voice cloning tech is in development but still rudimentary. Even then we have even further to go because now you not only need to sound natural but also deliver the lines in a believable manner. And then you need to consider that you might need multiple ways to deliver the same line or otherwise everyone will sound the same even though the voices themselves are different.

Imagine every single NPC walking around with the cadence of Christopher Walken or Bobcat Goldthwait. Wait....I’d actually pay for that..

EDIT: Although I imagine a stopgap would be to have a cheap VA say the lines and then overlay any kind of voice metrics. But you’d still have to tecord a ton of dialogue to make a worthwhile database.

Sources:

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/r...ored-experimental-technology/story?id=9987141

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/...e-anyones-voice-with-just-37-seconds-of-audio
 

DraQ

Arcane
Joined
Oct 24, 2007
Messages
32,828
Location
Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody
VA in general is of very variable utility. In some cases - when it is very good and well integrated into game's feel for whatever reason - it actually adds a lot to the experience. In many cases it doesn't. Synthetic VA is pretty much guaranteed to not be very good and so guaranteed to not be worth adding.

The only good reason to possibly want machine VO, would be needing dynamic VA and given that you tend to know what text your game contains there is rarely a reason for that.
This leaves us with those potential use cases:
  • Tiny, programmer-centric indie studio wanting VA for reasons, but not being able to handle actual human VA - say, you make a spacesim, and let all your spoken text through voice synth with some heavy handed filters to make it sound like low quality radio/vocoder.
  • Dealing with procedural generation of written text (and generating acceptable quality text is way harder than acceptable quality machine VA).
  • Specifically wanting fake sounding voice (but even in Portal they ended up mixing it with human VA)
 

FeelTheRads

Arcane
Joined
Apr 18, 2008
Messages
13,716
I guess I just wonder what limitation there are to dialogue trees if you have to hire voice actors. 1 million lines of dialogue might only ever result in 10 thousand lines of what you actually have spoken to you in the game because you made certain decisions.

I wonder how limited big productions are when it comes to having the unique story.

Let me tell you what would happen with big productions if they had free voice acting: same garbage, just more of it.

Voice acting is hardly the limiting factor. Talent is, though.
 
Self-Ejected

RNGsus

Self-Ejected
Joined
Apr 29, 2011
Messages
8,106
Who needs voice acting or dialogue wheels, when we have emojis? They even made a feature length movie about them.
 

TemplarGR

Dumbfuck!
Dumbfuck Bethestard
Joined
May 30, 2013
Messages
5,815
Location
Cradle of Western Civilization
I bet AI can develop some better games than some humans.

Not really. RPGs aren't just about stats and numbers, or else we would be playing Excel sheets. The best RPGs are those that combine good decision making, whether in combat or in C&C, with a good emotional investment for the player. The most beloved RPGs in the world are not those "incline" rpgs-for-autists, but games that people remember because they made them feel things, like the Witcher 3. Humans, contrary to popular codexer beliefs, are emotional creatures, we are not bots.

So i don't see how an AI with no capability of understanding human emotion, could make truly great games...
 

Theldaran

Liturgist
Joined
Oct 10, 2015
Messages
1,772
I bet AI can develop some better games than some humans.

Not really. RPGs aren't just about stats and numbers, or else we would be playing Excel sheets. The best RPGs are those that combine good decision making, whether in combat or in C&C, with a good emotional investment for the player. The most beloved RPGs in the world are not those "incline" rpgs-for-autists, but games that people remember because they made them feel things, like the Witcher 3. Humans, contrary to popular codexer beliefs, are emotional creatures, we are not bots.

So i don't see how an AI with no capability of understanding human emotion, could make truly great games...

The Witcher 3, huh...?

I was saying that in the light of some really mediocre games.

Let me rephrase it... *ahem* AI can come up with a better RPG system than Josh Sawyer.
 

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