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Comment by yieldcrv | Hacker News Reader

I’m looking forward to NPCs having dynamic responses with real voices

Doesn't have to be prerecorded, just trained

Games could have more than three dialogue options again!

I feel like if Bethesda really wants another industry defining game, this is the path they should be taking. AI generated conversation with AI generated voice acting with voice-to-text recognition. You can literally have microphone-voice conversations with NPCs that have rich, AI generated backgrounds and personalities.

Even bigger than that (I think at least) is the potential for fully voiced mods. There’s nothing stopping modders at that point from adding content indistinguishable from the base game.

I doubt Bethesda would facilitate this. They'd likely use voice actors to train the voice, and having a famous voice actor saying saucy kink/bdsm/violent things that you tend to see in some mods wouldn't be great PR

I'd love to see that. Voice acting for mods where you want to include new NPCs requires either someone to donate some voice lines, or paying for it to be recorded. If you want to patch existing NPCs, that's even harder because getting the original voice actor to do the new lines would require both persuading them to do it, and complying with any agreements they might have with the publisher that could prevent that.

How would the union take to that, though? This is not meant as an anti-union comment. I'd just be really surprised if Bethesda ever got to work with union VAs ever again if they went all in on an all-AI voiced game.

If they went all in on generated voices, would they want to work with voice actors?

I could see Bethesda still wanting to select voice actors to train the model with, especially if they're household names. So they'd get paid.

You do raise an interesting point, though. Compensation for AI-derived transformations of your work (in this case, your voice) needs to be a thing.

A galaxy scale exploration game on the scale of Elite Dangerous where you could have more complex and varied interaction would be pretty amazing. The way you could apply these new AI models to video games has some wild potential. I think video games are one of the areas where I see the most potential for positive impact rather than negative impact.

The file sizes would drop by 50 gigabytes again

Most of it is high definition audio these days, and then that just gets replaced by a 10gb training set, or maybe the training set becomes a shared resource on the console

Generating quality voice is sufficiently compute-intensive that it would increase the file size, as they would still ship all the audio (instead of computing locally) but there would just be so much more of it.

I'm working on a VR space game that actually uses Ssml azure cloud generated voices for dialog, but I've ditched the rogue-like procedural elements which are wickedly hard to implement

This would be incredible, especially with the thousands of unique characters games often have nowadays. Imagine every NPC having a unique voice, and the ability to dynamically respond to the players?

Damn that would do a ton for immersion!

Even customisable like your character's appearance. This was one of my criticisms of Fallout 4, the voice actors weren't bad, it just didn't fit very well some player characters.

Could really bring life to some older games with lots of text. Daggerfall springs to mind.

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