AI emulating voice actors

[Galactygon]

I saw these posts on Reddit and thought it would be fun to share them here. Could this be a way to add voiced lines to NPCs' unvoiced lines in the future?

 

This one is NSFW, listener discretion advised:

 

[Bartimaeus]

as someone who listens to a lot of audiobooks, I have to tell you

an AI impression of David Warner is legitimately better to listen to than the majority of actual real human readers for audiobooks, and this may prove incredible if the right companies can license the right voices

it's not nearly a perfect impression by any means, but it's still better

Edited May 1, 2023 by Bartimaeus

[Endarire]

The second AI voice was appropriate but the choice of subject matter was odd.

[Cahir]

It's a shame he didn't describe which tools did he use to accomplish this. I'd love to experiment myself. Seeing the entire BG saga fully voiced makes me drooling.

[Graion Dilach]

AI used as a new voice actor - cool.

AI used for impersonation - bad.

[B413]

I created a project on Github with all text by character name. I try to create one by one... and probably with some help to... voice and speech for all BG not yet existing character. I started by Imoen. You can see the result here:

InfinitySpeechProject/Baldur's Gate/en_US/TXT/IMOEN at main · B4st13n/InfinitySpeechProject (github.com)

I just did few samples for Imoen with eleven lab. I created the voice. You can download the mp3 and listen.
I also tried Jaheira... but eleven lab is not good enough yet for her accent. 
Eleven Lab is still very limited. I cannot create pause or adapt the pitch, speech, tone, ....
But all these AI stuff will give us the possibility to create, with the power of community, all missing speeches from all BG game. Soon...

With BG3 a lot of people discovered BG et BG2 and the main critic is always the same. BG1 and BG2 are great, even in 2023, but the gamers are use to speech nowadays. Speech are really missing in these old games.

[Jarinex]

More like reading skills are missing these days 

I’d rather read something than have a shitty AI line read.

[scorpio]

You should see this - the potential is huge, albeit the ethics of it...

 

[Bartimaeus]

On 8/11/2023 at 12:02 PM, Jarinex said:

More like reading skills are missing these days 

I’d rather read something than have a shitty AI line read.

I wouldn't read an audio book of an autobiography or something more serious, but for more silly reading that's just supposed to be entertaining, why not? The person who reads for you can inject some much needed style and energy to the increasingly repetitive and mundane that's missing from my own internal voice after having read a million books. I can barely read any sci-fi or fantasy at this point due to how tired it's gotten for me after many years of over-reading those two genres, so if someone recommends such to me, I'm certain to check out if there's an audiobook I can try instead. Though a bad reader just as often lessens the experience of a book rather than adding to it, which is why it's important for me to find readers that I actively like.

There's also the fact that some people are simply better with their imagination when being read to rather than reading themselves and find the former a richer experience than the latter, but given your...attitude about it, I imagine that's not the case for you. I am less concerned with people's methods of reading and more with that people make an attempt to read at all.

Edited August 17, 2023 by Bartimaeus

[Arvas]

On 8/11/2023 at 5:02 AM, B413 said:

I created a project on Github with all text by character name. I try to create one by one... and probably with some help to... voice and speech for all BG not yet existing character. I started by Imoen. You can see the result here:

InfinitySpeechProject/Baldur's Gate/en_US/TXT/IMOEN at main · B4st13n/InfinitySpeechProject (github.com)

I just did few samples for Imoen with eleven lab. I created the voice. You can download the mp3 and listen.
I also tried Jaheira... but eleven lab is not good enough yet for her accent. 
Eleven Lab is still very limited. I cannot create pause or adapt the pitch, speech, tone, ....
But all these AI stuff will give us the possibility to create, with the power of community, all missing speeches from all BG game. Soon...

With BG3 a lot of people discovered BG et BG2 and the main critic is always the same. BG1 and BG2 are great, even in 2023, but the gamers are use to speech nowadays. Speech are really missing in these old games.

Awesome, great work! I was also playing around with TTS for BG and was really impressed with how far the tech has gotten, but unfortunately don't have the time to work on this right now. So I really hope you continue to develop this – I'd be especially interested in a voiced BG2.

Apart from what has been said, I think that voicing all text via AI will increase the accessibility of the series, e.g., for people with a reading impairment.

Did you know that a similar mod is being developed for Morrowind and quite successful? https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/52279

With Baldur's Gate 3 out, I think that many players will want to try out its predecessors. So if there ever was a right time for such a mod, I think it is now

[Graion Dilach]

Wow, this thread attracted a lot of scumbags since my last post here.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/audio/voice-actors-express-worry-over-modders-cloning-voices-with-ai

[Arvas]

26 minutes ago, Graion Dilach said:

Wow, this thread attracted a lot of scumbags since my last post here.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/audio/voice-actors-express-worry-over-modders-cloning-voices-with-ai

First, are you interested in a meaningful discussion? Then I suggest you to watch your tone and stop insulting people – thank you.

Second, I do think that those ethical and legal considerations are important. However, I also believe it is a different thing to fill in blanks using voices of actors that subscribed to voice the very same game (as we discuss here), than using them to voice completely different games, or even pornographic content (as described in your linked article).

 

 

[Thacobell]

"Wow this thing that can be used to impersonate real live people and use in projects without their consent or make them say whatever we want is great!"
A bunch of totally hinged people...

[Graion Dilach]

Hi-Rez Studio just blasted a bomb on this topic in the last 24 hours. And the mods, like that Witcher III A Night to Remember cited in my article aren't pornographic, since that one's a questmod. I fail to see how to have a meaningful discussion with such tactless ignorant bastards, who can't even get their damn facts straight. You don't like being treated with the respect you deserve? Go and distribute that manure you're spewing on a farmland, so that the plants can benefit from it.

[Bartimaeus]

The ethical quandaries of "AI" currently being used to generate "new" content when their "creations" are, in fact, 100% derived from the lives and work of others is indeed massive. We're not talking about a matter of inspiration, homage, or even simple imitation, but rather computer algorithms mindlessly gobbling up, aggregating, and smashing together the greatest of our artists, writers, performers et al. into these gobbledygook monstrosities - in the matter of somewhere between just minutes and hours! I am personally hoping that the law will very fiercely make any monetization of such unlicensed efforts prohibitively illegal. I am also hoping that nobody will be able to give away the "rights" to somebody that has already passed away: David Warner can't agree to have his voice used for this sort of thing, and I would personally find it gross if his family could possibly sell the rights to his voice without the man himself having ever been able to weigh in on the decision. This is very much a new and rather frightening frontier.

But for fun? For personal use? For anything that's not monetized in any way? And if it's clearly marked as "THIS IS AN IMITATION GENERATED BY A COMPUTER"? That I am not so sure about, though I am certain that there will be many great debates about it as this technology continues to mature and become more commonplace - for better or for worse.