I agree that this is a problem.
suggestion:
When characters are chained together, the uppermost of the chained chars does the talking or you can otherwise select a speaker.
Thats not perfect but I think it may be an improvement.
In most games I give talking skills to the main char because he does all the talking.
Being able to select a speaker would be nice, like when you play a dumb and ugly barbarian and you want your sorcerer to do the talking.
The player character should be the default choice.
But almost anything would be better then using the closest char, especially when this is beyond your control.
It is often not clear at which exact place a cut scene starts and not clear which char triggers the scene when you tell your group to walk there.
Prof. Dr. Dr. Mad S. Tist
World leading expert of artificial stupidity.
Because there are too many people who work on artificial intelligence already
