Embark Studios' The Finals uses text-to-speech AI for in-game voices

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unsurprisingly, these lines sound like total shit.
- ow, my robit balls
- Really? I find them totally fine. Pretty impressive really when you take scope and responsiveness into account.

The main announcer sounds like he is just phoning this in for the paycheck and stumbles over stuff like he can't believe he has to read this. Wow. AI is so authentic these days.
More seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if more games with announcers started replacing them with AI. In a lot of those games, it's easy to tune it out and not really pay attention to it. I'm not sure if someone casually playing would even realize it's AI. I'm curious how long it will take until a publisher tries to put AI voice-acting in a game where players would actually notice the dialogue sounding unnatural.
- I think players are desensitised to unnatural dialogue. For example, to my Western ear lots of Asian games seem to have weird dialogue, no doubt due to poor translation. (Kojima is known to insist his dialogue be translated strictly and literally from the Japanese which explains, partially, why his games feel pretty strange. Plus Kojima is bonkers.)

Seems pretty neat I guess, but not for me... personally prefer to support actual voice actors making a living, putting passion into their work - not some random C suite or shareholder using AI to cut costs

The female voice didn't sound so bad next to the train wreck of the main announcer.

I think tech like this makes way more sense for like random ass NPCs. Like the ones cluttering the background of a city or whatever. AI could really enhance them and make them interesting.

This is the kind of shit I think of when people tell me AI is taking people's jobs.

That’s a damn bummer. Game plays great, and with the microtransactions they’re gonna make bank. I’m curious where the decision came from to do this, rather than hiring voice talent.

17 comments