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saying VAing will be replaced by AI outside of a few games a year is pretty silly, and very western-focused aside. In Japan popular VAs are an industry onto themselves, even if they could replace them all perfectly with AI they never would, they're a marketing aspect. Even very small games (even some indies) will try and get a popular VA or two. And I can't see those games going for AI voice acting when translated when dub VAs are usually so cheap anyway and AI voice acting is pretty bad PR at this point, and if they wanted to cheap out completely they could just not have a dub at all. And there's really no mid-size development level in the west. So the only thing I can really see it being used for is complete unknown indies and incidental VAing of random enemy robots or whatever.
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Feb 25, 2023 18:06
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Endorph posted:saying VAing will be replaced by AI outside of a few games a year is pretty silly, and very western-focused aside. In Japan popular VAs are an industry onto themselves, even if they could replace them all perfectly with AI they never would, they're a marketing aspect. Even very small games (even some indies) will try and get a popular VA or two. And I can't see those games going for AI voice acting when translated when dub VAs are usually so cheap anyway and AI voice acting is pretty bad PR at this point, and if they wanted to cheap out completely they could just not have a dub at all. I suspect we'll get 1-2 attempts at "Here's a fully AI game!", like how they tried shoving NFTs into things, and once they dribble out a meager return the whole thing collapses
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Feb 25, 2023 18:14
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I don't really get where the idea that voice acting is somehow suppressing or crushing the life out of original narratives and dialogue in gaming comes from, at all. There are dozens of indie games being released on a weekly basis that don't have a single line of voice acting or have partial VA at best, a fair amount of them quite wordy and plot heavy. Disco Elysium released with only partial voice acting before the final cut and it would have worked fine with none. For AAA level budgets, voice acting is generally a relatively small percentage of the overall budget compared to the enormous cost of realizing modern AAA graphical expectations. Kanos fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Feb 25, 2023 |
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Feb 25, 2023 18:22
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Kanos posted:I don't really get where the idea that voice acting is somehow suppressing or crushing the life out of original narratives and dialogue in gaming comes from, at all. There are dozens of indie games being released every single day that don't have a single line of voice acting, many of them quite wordy and plot heavy. for an extreme example of something similar, persona 5 had a lot of rewrites after its 2d animated cutscenes were already done. that's why you get things like the characters randomly telling the protagonist to put his glasses on even when he isnt wearing them, he does so, takes one step, and then he is in a 2d animated cutscene where he has his glasses on. however, this isn't really a symptom of voice acting, but a symptom of AAA game development being a cluster, and I don't think removing VA would solve this issue because there's still thngs like 'levels are already completed,' 'models for characters are already completed,' 'the scene is already animated,' etc. If anything, voice acting is one of the easier and faster things to redo if you have to throw a scene out after implementing it. if you decide against having the main character's father turn out to be evil and have him make some kind of heroic sacrifice for the player instead, you can just throw out his villainous monologue scene and get the VA to record a few lines of him going 'i do this... for you... son...' It could be done in a week tops if you can get a hold of the VA, and recording a few more lines isn't that expensive, and only represents the work of one person. but if you already made level 9: your dad is evil and made the Evil Dad boss fight, that represents months of work by dozens of people that has to be either thrown out or retooled in some way.
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Feb 25, 2023 18:27
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Right, I understand all that, but I seriously doubt that needing to get VAs into a studio to rerecord lines is some kind of serious hobble on game story writing to the point that replacing all VA work with AI is going to lead to a noticeable improvement in the writing quality of video games as suggested by the original post. As you say, there's roughly ten million other things that need to be done to accommodate major story rewrites during a project that represent way more worker hours, cost, and effort than scheduling the VA to come in to do some new takes. Even if you had a freeform AI voice acting program that did convincing performances and everyone was cool with it you'd still need to spend a lot of time redoing other elements of the scene to begin with.
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Feb 25, 2023 18:37
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Magmarashi posted:I suspect we'll get 1-2 attempts at "Here's a fully AI game!", like how they tried shoving NFTs into things, and once they dribble out a meager return the whole thing collapses I could see slamming out some AI lines for background characters to save time, easily.
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Feb 25, 2023 18:41
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even if you had a perfect ai calibrating it and prodding it to get the delivery you want still represents manhours, there will never be an ai that can just intuit exactly how it's supposed to read something. it can make guesses based on previous data but they're just that, guesses.
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Feb 25, 2023 18:41
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Yeah, in a language with as many homographs as English, you’re probably not saving much time simply because you’d want to have someone comb through the AI’s “performance” to make sure that they’re using the proper pronunciation in that specific context. Even if they only used it for incidental background dialogue, all it takes is one mispronunciation to immediately tip off anyone who’s a natural speaker that something’s wrong and rips them out of the experience (…unless the mispronunciation is an intentional dramatic effect, of course).
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Feb 25, 2023 19:03
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AI voices for games will suck rear end OP. Like I don’t get how anyone can think “this will be good for games” unless they’re someone who is actively running a company and wants to shave dollars. All this AI generated garbage is great for when you see a Twitter shitpost about presidents dunking on games in monotone voices, but an actually good performance relies on knowing how to approach a role. Even when people don’t like the voices much like for Triangle Strategy, even then there was a VA that absolutely killed it when he had to act drunk and went over the top with the role. I’m going to out myself and say that I think that pretty much all AI stuff is poo poo and I’m sick of the random “look at my cool AI prompt” that is always, always something stupid looking. AI sucks and I am in total favour of voice actors locking down their contracts so big game companies can’t just steal their voice.
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Feb 25, 2023 19:29
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The Black Stones posted:AI voices for games will suck rear end OP. Like I don’t get how anyone can think “this will be good for games” unless they’re someone who is actively running a company and wants to shave dollars. All this AI generated garbage is great for when you see a Twitter shitpost about presidents dunking on games in monotone voices, but an actually good performance relies on knowing how to approach a role. Even when people don’t like the voices much like for Triangle Strategy, even then there was a VA that absolutely killed it when he had to act drunk and went over the top with the role. AI art should have never risen from "Columbo as a MTG card" and AI voices should never have strayed from making Winnie the Pooh swear, these were the pinnacles of the technologies and everything after has been a stressful nightmare
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Feb 25, 2023 20:03
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DancingMachine posted:Voiceovers is the next frontier and yeah I think it will totally wipe out all VA except for maybe the biggest AAAA games that are paying for starpower (e.g. Cyberpunk with Keanu Reeves). This is probably only a couple years out or so. If anybody knows folks that make their living primarily doing VA, definitely would advise them to start pursuing other skills. This definitely sucks for voice actors but honestly I think it's a great thing for games. Folks who didn't play a lot of games in the 90's don't really understand how much narrative games lost when voice became an expectation/requirement. Going to proc gen voice is going to bring back a lot of fantastic dialogue writing that died back then.
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Feb 25, 2023 20:26
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I have no doubt that people will try to replace VA with AI — Wanted: Dead just released two weeks ago with some straight up text-to-speech NPC voices lmao — but I disagree that it’s the most vulnerable target for digital replacement. Asset generation is by far the costliest and most time-consuming aspect of game development, and one that people are very aggressively trying to replace right now with AI in several creative industries. People are generally way less discerning at evaluating the difference between human-generated art than voices and unlike VA there aren’t even any strong unions to stand against them. It’s also I think easier to work people into a moral outrage over their favorite video game voice actors getting replaced by a machine than explaining why a machine-written translation or iterations on their Roblox skins also deprives another human being of their livelihood. The largely invisible (to the consumer) aspects of game development will be the first to be seriously threatened.
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Feb 25, 2023 20:53
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I think it's an inevitablilty that AI voices will make it into games eventually - probably accidentially. Lots of studios already use machine-generated TTS to help with line timings - it's just a matter of time before a studio (or, more realistically, an unscrupulous robovoice vendor) starts replacing Microsoft Sam with some AI-generated voice, and a studio forgetting to remove the hookup to the temporary asset in favor of the final one.
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Feb 25, 2023 21:18
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Wasn’t there a recent thing where an AI made a rap that sounds totally like it was performed by Eminem? It was totally indistinguishable from an actual Eminem song. I think AI voice acting will come sooner than people expect. And it will plausibly be an improvement on the garbage standard of video game voice acting.
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Feb 25, 2023 21:27
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Vegetable posted:Wasn’t there a recent thing where an AI made a rap that sounds totally like it was performed by Eminem? It was totally indistinguishable from an actual Eminem song. I think AI voice acting will come sooner than people expect. And it will plausibly be an improvement on the garbage standard of video game voice acting. With how AI voicing works, I'm not surprised. It literally steals from however many samples you throw into it. Run that sucker a few hundred times and you can basically generate anything that sounds exactly like the voice with randomized inflection points that sound pretty great when edited together.
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Feb 25, 2023 22:08
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With a generic beat in the background, like this. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2tRk3kaos4A
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Feb 25, 2023 22:43
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I don't know about ai voices, but text to speech is definitely used as placeholder assets already because the turnaround time on vo is so long. Whether ai speech is the answer or not, and whether it is the only bottleneck or not, it is absolutely true that the amount of time it takes to go from "writer writes a line" to "vo asset is in the game" is very long for games, particularly big games. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if that turnaround could be significantly improved by just hiring voice actors on a full time salary to do whatever is needed whenever, but god forbid someone gets paid for time where they might not have anything to do.
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Feb 25, 2023 23:19
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Truspeaker posted:I don't know about ai voices, but text to speech is definitely used as placeholder assets already because the turnaround time on vo is so long. Whether ai speech is the answer or not, and whether it is the only bottleneck or not, it is absolutely true that the amount of time it takes to go from "writer writes a line" to "vo asset is in the game" is very long for games, particularly big games. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if that turnaround could be significantly improved by just hiring voice actors on a full time salary to do whatever is needed whenever, but god forbid someone gets paid for time where they might not have anything to do. The super cool thing about AI VO is that some nerd is gonna end up going back and fully voicing something dumb like Chrono Trigger, and using all these super famous people as the VAs. Chrono is played by Rocky era Stallone, the Robo is played by Marvin from Hitchhikers Guide, and Frog is played by that annoying frog from the early 2000s ringtone service commercials.
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Feb 26, 2023 02:48
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Sorry I made everyone mad about VA. The tech is very close, I expect it will be able to do basically anything you want at top quality in single digit years. The only thing you won't be able to do is celebrity voices, for legal reasons obviously. (and heck, even for celeb voices you could just work out a deal to pay the celebrity and then use the AI to actually execute). Like I said the cost isn't that large as a percentage of a AAA game's budget, but the flexibility and iteration speed gains will make it straight up not make sense to use human VA anymore. I guess I would lump in Endorph's explanation of the Japanese market under the celebrity voice exception, which sounds like maybe it's more important in Japan than it is in the west. And yes, I have literally been in conversations numerous times on multiple projects where the team decided not to make a minor improvement to some content because we'd need to re-record VO.
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Feb 26, 2023 04:34
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I doubt the tech will eclipse primary voice acting roles, at least in major titles. But stuff like incidental dialog could be big. All the pointlessly VA'd Elder Scrolls/Assassin's Creed NPC chatter kind of thing.
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Feb 26, 2023 04:43
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Like procedural generation, you won't save time on AI stuff because if you want high quality you'll have to spend the time pruning and fine tuning the AI model to produce things worth a drat. Even AI voice will have to be checked for flat affect, sudden shifts in tone, and bugs like changing gender.
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Feb 26, 2023 05:46
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fez_machine posted:Like procedural generation, you won't save time on AI stuff because if you want high quality you'll have to spend the time pruning and fine tuning the AI model to produce things worth a drat.
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Feb 26, 2023 06:50
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DancingMachine posted:straight up not make sense to use human VA anymore. It makes sense because an AI will never be able to give a performance as good as an actual living person. Companies that aren’t willing to pay for good VA aren’t going to pay for good AI, and you are going to see poo poo tier garbage just like how the new Ant-Man’s movie CG was complete turd from a butt because they are burning through CG studios because they don’t give a poo poo. Even though CG is a pretty figured out thing. You are actively going “hm yes. This tech that will put an entire industry worth of people out of work (lol that the person whose voice is “chosen” would be paid anything near a living wage) is a good thing!” I can’t wait until DC trains an Ai on Kevin Conroy’s voice and goes “hurf durf Batman fans want this” and don’t tell me they won’t try this because they will.
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Feb 26, 2023 06:54
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I bet Seth Macfarlane is watching the Voice AI stuff closely with how tired he is of doing Family Guy/American Dad voices.
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Feb 26, 2023 07:08
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Grayshift posted:All the pointlessly VA'd Elder Scrolls/Assassin's Creed NPC chatter kind of thing. That or having characters being able to pronounce the player's custom name instead of leaving it out of all spoken dialogue but still showing it in the text.
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Feb 26, 2023 13:19
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I could see it done for a lot of background noise as well. Like you're in a huge crowd in a city and the game wants to have the background murmur of the crowd be more true to life without hiring a billion voice actors.
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Feb 26, 2023 13:49
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ErrEff posted:That or having characters being able to pronounce the player's custom name instead of leaving it out of all spoken dialogue but still showing it in the text. I want to note that Tokimeki Memorial of all games did this like 30 years ago, but it's an easier task to solve in Japanese than it is in English.
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Feb 26, 2023 19:18
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ErrEff posted:That or having characters being able to pronounce the player's custom name instead of leaving it out of all spoken dialogue but still showing it in the text.
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Feb 26, 2023 19:53
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Arsenic Lupin posted:That couldn't be done without in-game live access to the actual voice-synthesis software, which would be spendy and/or slow. Not really, if you generate all the necessary samples after finishing character creation you won't have to do it live since you presumably know where the name is going to be used. It could also be a way for companies to do the live service/Aways online thing by having the voice synthesis in the cloud, which would save on computing time/money by storing the samples for the same name instead of resynthesizing every time someone names their character John or whatever.
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Feb 26, 2023 20:08
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Hel posted:Not really, if you generate all the necessary samples after finishing character creation
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Feb 26, 2023 20:13
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Arsenic Lupin posted:That's the part that would be spendy and-or slow. Yeah, but my point is that slow doesn't really matter, because it's not live.
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Feb 26, 2023 20:52
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fez_machine posted:Even AI voice will have to be checked for flat affect, sudden shifts in tone, and bugs like changing gender. aside from the "and bugs" part of that sentence, all of that applies to the vast majority of VG voice acting that already exists.
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Feb 26, 2023 21:04
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https://twitter.com/fuchs1apunk/status/1353345541346893824 (thread) This is seriously an interesting piece of gaming history. Again, it's much easier to solve this issue in Japanese because pronunciation adheres much more strictly to the syllabary than English phonetics does with its spelling. But with a bit of direction from the player and probably a bunch of voice samples, it was possible to generate a decent voiced name without any machine learning algos, in 1999.
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Feb 26, 2023 21:30
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Didn't the game 'Black & White' have a feature where they programmed in a lot of people's names? The game would whisper 'death' when one of your tiny people died, nice and spooky, and they programmed it to sometimes whisper your name instead, if if was a name they had. That's awesome IMO. Like the Fallout 4 robot who has a bunch of names he can say.
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Feb 26, 2023 21:43
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The recent Forza games still do that, they have lines for many common names and if you have your real name set in your Xbox Live account it will pick it up automatically
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Feb 26, 2023 21:57
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There’s exactly one situation in which I think AI voice acting is acceptable and that’s to replace Justin Roiland in all of the various things he created and can’t participate in because he’s a gross-rear end motherfucker
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Feb 27, 2023 08:27
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You could also just use whichever roiland impersonator they hired on to finish the rick & morty tv show after firing him
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Feb 27, 2023 08:51
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One of the other potential applications of AI in gaming is voice to voice transfer. Basically, a single person can record generic lines for your low grade NPCs, shopkeeps, guards, etc, and then AI can shift that into a different 'voice' for every NPC, across the full range of age or gender, voice tone, speed, while using the original as the blueprint means that pronunciation and emphasis and affect remains. It's not huge but it helps avoid you recognising everyone saying 'hello' with the same voice clip. Some places will probably also end up applying it to the whole game including major characters and save money by having one voice actor record every line in the game and at shifting them all. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 10:20 on Feb 27, 2023 |
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Feb 27, 2023 10:14
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RPATDO_LAMD posted:You could also just use whichever roiland impersonator they hired on to finish the rick & morty tv show after firing him Just hire Michael Cusack.
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Feb 27, 2023 15:03
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MikeJF posted:One of the other potential applications of AI in gaming is voice to voice transfer. Basically, a single person can record generic lines for your low grade NPCs, shopkeeps, guards, etc, and then AI can shift that into a different 'voice' for every NPC, across the full range of age or gender, voice tone, speed, while using the original as the blueprint means that pronunciation and emphasis and affect remains. It's not huge but it helps avoid you recognising everyone saying 'hello' with the same voice clip. I saw a demo of this kind of tech back in the early 2000's at a Microsoft techfair, they called it Voice Fonts. I dunno why it never was used in a commercial product.
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Feb 27, 2023 15:27
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