AI voice synthesising is being hailed as the future of video games – but at what cost?
W hen the epic open-world PlayStation 4 game Red Dead Redemption 2 was developed in 2013, it took 2,200 days to record the 1,200 voices in the game with 700 voice actors, who recited the 500,000 lines of dialogue.
It was a massive feat that is nearly impossible for any other studio to replicate – let alone a games studio smaller than Rockstar Games.
But with advances in artificial intelligence it is becoming easier and easier to recreate human voices to create automated real-time responses, near limitless dialogue options and speech tailored to a user’s unique input. But the technology raises questions about the ethics of synthesising voices.
The Australian software developer Replica Studios rolled out a voice synthesiser platform for games developers in 2019 – a tool used by Australian games developer PlaySide Studios in their game Age of Darkness: Final Stand.
“We would hope that there’d be hundreds, if not thousands of other studios that could dream of building games like [Red Dead Redemption 2] because everyone wants to do that,” Shreyas Nivas, the chief executive of Replica Studios, says.
Recording every line of dialogue individually is “so inefficient from a cost perspective, but also from a time perspective, and you need to have these huge teams”, Nivas says.
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Replica has licensed the voices of 120 actors for use in video games, which are capable of up to 1,000 different vocal tones, according to the company.
Nivas says he sees AI voice synthesising as the future but, as with many AI advances, the practice is fraught with ethical dilemmas.
There are now free online voice synthesiser tools that can be used to mimic celebrities’ or film and TV character voices – often
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