What an incredibly godawful, dumbass idea.
Look, I’m going to skip over issues of voice actors, quality, etc, and go directly to:
Your voice doesn’t sound to you like it sounds to other people. Almost everyone hates playback of their voice. This is a great way to get people to haaaaaate playing your game.
Who says I have to use my own voice? I’m going to splice together clips of PeeWee Herman.
In theory, the idea is okay. I wouldn’t mind an avatar having my own voice.
In practice, fuck no. It’s EA. I don’t want my voice to live on producing new dialogue long after I’m dead in order to fill some corporation’s pockets.
I’m sure they could change the synthetic voice so that it sounds like your perception of your own voice
Is the AI gonna play a voice I pick, or am I just going to talk to the game and hear the responses of the other, non-player characters like I was having a real conversation with people? Because one of those is an awesome idea.
If I read the article correctly, instead of the protagonist character having a voice actor, they want to take a bunch of voice samples of you and then use that to generate their dialogue.
I wouldn’t be surprised, in the slightest, to learn that agreeing to play this game, gives them full rights to the voice generator they build from your samples, and they pick and choose from those instead of having any voice actors in future games.
i don’t talk while playing, that character gonna sound like family talking in the other room lmao
The way it’s written in the article, with the mention of the detective game and how it is using it, it sounds like it’s not generating a voice based on your voice, but dialogue based on what you are saying. But then the article author’s use of “dubbing” throws that into question. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the detective game they mentioned in the article, though. And it just generates the NPC responses on the questions (or statements) you give to them. And you’re talking to them entirely with a microphone, not typing anything or selecting pre-made choices.
I don’t particularly hate my voice when played back.
I just don’t recognize it as my own voice at all.
Setting the shittiness aside, once again a horseshit patent award. This is not a novel or innovative idea. It’s a stupid fucking limitation on others if entertained.
Patents are cancer. I say this as the creator of several of them.
Software patents are weird but normal patents are reasonable in my opinion.
Seriously. Patent length was chosen before the industrial revolution. It only coincidentally made sense through that period of mechanization. But in computing, twenty-odd years is an eternity.
In 2000 there were no shaders.
In 1980 there were no IBM PCs.
In 1960 there were no microchips.
Why the fuck would any idea from when Pong was fresh and new deserve absolute control until after the Super Nintendo? There could be Dreamcast games with features that that nobody was allowed to do again until last year.
After that AI generated image was denied copyright, not sure how this can be enforced
An AI image is a result of a technology, which falls under copyright.
A method to generate AI audio is the technology itself, which falls under patent law.
These are two entirely different things that should never be conflated.
We already fucking hate hearing our own voices on recordings or in Discord with feedback. Why does anybody think this is a good idea?
Not to dismiss people who are fine listening to their own voice but this feels like mega narcissistic at the very least and just plain weird to everybody else.
One, FUCK software patents.
Two, this is what AI means for voice acting: there won’t be any voice acting. Nobody has to get cloned. There doesn’t need to be an original performance to modify. We have the technology for artists to make up how a character sounds, the same way artists can make up how a character looks. Like how nobody plays a cartoon. There’s still live-action, and mocap, and there will still be people’s real voices behind imaginary faces. But that is now optional.
Three, nobody wants to hear their own voice. Morgan Freeman probably thinks he sounds weird and nasal onscreen.
That could be quite cool if done well.
If it were entirely local and respected privacy, sure.
Since there’s no shot of that, it’s a nightmare.
Meh, I don’t really care and most won’t either.
No
Yes times infinity
I know you are but what am I?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The patent itself spends a considerable amount of time documenting the technical features of how input data is processed, but I’ll be focusing on the game design implications here since they’re more interesting.
Inworld Origins hinges around the player roleplaying as a detective and asking AI NPC characters questions, with answers generated on-the-spot based on that input.
It’s so possible that recently, official English anime voice actors were openly speculating that they had been dubbed over with AI by Namco Bandai in the latest Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm game.
Most video game playable characters already function primarily as self-inserts from a narrative perspective, but making that connection literal seems like a quick way to break immersion.
Considering the sheer scope of Electronic Arts and the funding available to them, I think they should just stick to hiring actual people for video game voiceover, especially for plot-critical characters.
Adopting technology like this seems like a pretty sharp step backward from an industry that’s been selling video games to us with face-scanned screen actors for the better part of the past decade.
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