Neutral Evil in fact. I've been spending free time this week using a voice synthesizer to add a voice to previously unvoiced lines in Baldur's Gate II. I chose to do a certain pivotal segment of Viconia's romance subplot first, because it was one of the more memorable to me.
I'd be lying if all the talk here around having voiced and unvoiced characters didn't cross my mind a few times while doing this. I've considered using some of the voiced lines from Tav to play around with the dialogue in BG3, but that might be a little forward. Especially considering the game isn't even released yet.
I'm really excited to see what 'A.I.' does for video games in our near future. RPGs will have the most to gain from them, and we'll likely see it first in the modding community, as long as the tools aren't kept out of their hands.
Wow! I’ll confess it’s years and years since I tried Viconia’s romance in BG2 so can’t recall how much was already voiced, but that sounds really good. I’m a total AI (and voice synthesiser) ignoramous, so would be interested to know more about the process you went through.
I do have Luddite concerns about the potential impact of AI like this on voice actors, both in terms of reducing the amount of work and the possibility of their performances being used as inputs for AI without credit or reward, but I can also see the huge potential advantages for modders and smaller independent games producers in particular, so as with most technological advances I’m sure there will be pros and cons. But if we’re so close to being able to have AI turn in creditable voice performances, sounds like those implications need to be worked through with some urgency! I assume they’re already hot topics of debate amongst interested parties.
"You may call it 'nonsense' if you like, but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!"
And now that the Uncanny Valley is at the edges of being surpassed, many on screen acting jobs will also. The live actors won’t anytime soon as they will be the face in media etc. However, stunt actors, background actors, side characters etc. Imagine the terminator movies, Titanic, etc with only two or three real actors.
Is a day coming when people will realize that anything digital can be faked or altered, including voices, videos, emails, news reels, wikipedia pages, cell phone ID's, and even currency?
Gaze deeply into the mists of Leira ...
"Leira, Lady of Mists, Mother of All Illusion, the Guardian of Deception, the Mistshadow ... Some say gods are an illusion we create to disguise our fear of living, our fear of dying, our fear of being. If gods are a disguise, if gods are an illusion, then perhaps Leira is the only beacon of truth in our entire pantheon of lies. But if gods are real and true and all-knowing, then Leira cannot be a god and must be dead if indeed she ever lived at all." - Shaella, BG I
Yeah, I was just showing the other day to few friends the current project to voice all NPCs in Morrowind using AI-generated voice over.
This stuff is improving at an almost-alarming rate, too, so what may sound "more or less convincing" today will be basically flawless "few papers down the line" (cit.). Even in its current state, a lot of the lines in the video I linked are already fairly better than a lot of cases of amateur voice acting done for modding purposes... Or past cases of bad voice acting in gaming, in general.
There's also a vast range of possible applications, too. For instance in the past I've been really vocal (hehe) about the fact that expecting a fully voiced protagonist in BG3 will all the possible permutations of who the MC can be available would be unreasonable. But now imagine if they just had to register one male and female variation for the MC and then they could use AI to over-impose alternate vocal timbers on these lines. The cost would be grought down immensely, if with a marginal compromise in quality/unicity of the output, while the feasibility would improve dramatically.
Last edited by Tuco; 24/02/2303:31 PM.
Party control in Baldur's Gate 3 is a complete mess that begs to be addressed. SAY NO TO THE TOILET CHAIN
I do have Luddite concerns about the potential impact of AI like this on voice actors, both in terms of reducing the amount of work and the possibility of their performances being used as inputs for AI without credit or reward, but I can also see the huge potential advantages for modders and smaller independent games producers in particular, so as with most technological advances I’m sure there will be pros and cons. But if we’re so close to being able to have AI turn in creditable voice performances, sounds like those implications need to be worked through with some urgency! I assume they’re already hot topics of debate amongst interested parties.
As far as modding goes, it doesn't really surpass in my eyes what we already do with other people's work. As long as nobody tries to profit from it, or claim it as a wholly original work, I don't think the powers-that-be should treat it more seriously than anything else.
As for completely replacing the need for VO, I don't really have a good answer to that. As far as I know (which isn't a lot) "A.I." doesn't actually create anything new, all of human recorded history has been sitting in a great stew of that scientists poured into an algorithm, that through extensive use of flash cards and night classes, is able to determine what sounds correlate to what emotion, and what emotions to what context, and whatever else they could think of regarding linguistics. Right now I think it's still easier to use a person to accomplish those things, but like likeness rights to movie stars, it might not be too far off where voice actors sit down and read a few dozen prompts and get a check in the mail whenever their voice is used. I think James Earl Jones, already did something like to allow his voice to be used for Darth Vader in perpetuity.
Originally Posted by The Red Queen
Wow! I’ll confess it’s years and years since I tried Viconia’s romance in BG2 so can’t recall how much was already voiced, but that sounds really good. I’m a total AI (and voice synthesiser) ignoramous, so would be interested to know more about the process you went through.
The initial line of each LoveTalk is what originally existed in the game. I used ElevenLabs voice synthesizer because it was the first time a Voice AI actually sounded real to me. And for some reason Youtube thought I should be made aware of dozens of Dagoth Ur memes using it (not wrong). I extracted all the sound files from Baldur's Gate II, listened to all of Viconia's lines, separating them by tone, I extracted one of the dialogue files, and signed up with ElevenLabs. I created I think what eventually became 6 Viconia voices, by putting in lines only using a certain tone, I then started generating the lines with the dialogue used. You have to play around with the text to get the right read, add line breaks, periods, change a word here or there to something more phonetically appropriate. You generate the dialogue half a dozen times, until you get a few workable one, or sometimes I would splice a few together with Audacity. I did that for most of the longer lines, you can probably tell. Viconia sometimes has a thicker accent too, I'm not sure where that came from. You can see one of the lines I kept trying to get a better read of in the outtakes toward the end, it was like that but usually for longer lines, maybe I'll put up a video with more stuff like that. With the minimum subscription at ElevenLabs, you only get 30,000 characters a month to work with, so I couldn't spend too much time with every line I would have liked. Still, there are 2 or 3 in there I think are spot on, and more than a few that are passable.
Yeah, I was just showing the other day to few friends the current project to voice all NPCs in Morrowind using AI-generated voice over.
This stuff is improving at an almost-alarming rate, too, so what may sound "more or less convincing" today will be basically flawless "few papers down the line" (cit.). Even in its current state, a lot of the lines in the video I linked are already fairly better than a lot of cases of amateur voice acting done for modding purposes... Or past cases of bad voice acting in gaming, in general.
There's also a vast range of possible applications, too. For instance in the past I've been really vocal (hehe) about the fact that expecting a fully voiced protagonist in BG3 will all the possible permutations of who the MC can be available would be unreasonable. But now imagine if they just had to register one male and female variation for the MC and then they could use AI to over-impose alternate vocal timbers on these lines. The cost would be grought down immensely, if with a marginal compromise in quality/unicity of the output, while the feasibility would improve dramatically.
Its exciting to think what Morrowind will look like in the near future, the recreation projects have already reached a point where they're adding new areas, quests, and characters to the game, and now they have tools to create them fully voiced. I watched another video of Vivec fully voiced and I have to admit it was long enough ago, that I wasn't sure if Vivec had any voice acting to begin with, probably the perfect place to start working original voices in. With a few mis-reads it was as good as anything in the original game. (Probably better in fact)
