A new The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt mod gives Geralt new voice lines via an AI tech that can simulate his iconic voice actor.
The A Night to Remember mod for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt sets Geralt on a vampire-hunting adventure, and the team behind it has used impressive technology and existing voice lines to give Geralt new dialogue, using an AI tech called CyberVoice to simulate Geralt’s voice. That allowed the mod team to generate entirely new dialogue in addition to reusing and remixing existing voice lines. CyberVoice is a paid service and its website is incredibly tight-lipped about how the technology works, but think of the technology as similar to Deepfakes, albeit in an audio rather than video format.
You can see the trailer for A Night to Remember below, showing off some of Geralt's new lines which have been seemlessly spliced together with existing recordings. See if you can tell which lines are which:
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The results are scarily accurate to the actual voice actor, Doug Cockle, whose monotone, gravelly delivery is an iconic part of Geralt’s character. The tech involved here could be a huge boon for modders who simply don’t have access to the original voice actors, but at the same time there are some concerns, both legal and moral, surrounding the technology. CyberVoice does allow voice actors to partner with them, but the 'Monster Killer' demonstration - listed as parody on the game's website - is a pretty clear replication of Cockle's voice, despite making no reference to the actor himself.
If you want to check out the mod for yourself and see just how accurate the voice over sounds, then you can download A Night to Remember over at NexusMods. It’s recommended that you finish both the base game and the Blood and Wine DLC before tackling this new quest though, as it’s set after the events depicted there.
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