In October 2023, gaming giant Electronic Arts (EA) submitted a patent. This is a normal thing companies do for proprietary technology and ideas, but this one…is something else. This particular patent outlines a technology that would produce a character’s speech audio within a video game, with the player’s own voice.
We’re not sure how to feel about this…troubling concept.
“A computer-implemented method of generating speech audio in a video game is provided, the patent reads. “The method includes inputting, into a synthesizer module, input data that represents speech content. Source acoustic features for the speech content in the voice of a source speaker are generated and are input, along with a speaker embedding associated with a player of the video game into an acoustic feature encoder of a voice convertor.”
Many who game with the option to create custom characters tend to want those characters to speak. The older methods to achieve this require a lot of recoded speech data, and multiple actors to provide those lines of dialog. EA is attempting to introduce a new system that would allow in-game characters to speak in the player’s voice, without requiring that pre-recorded speech data.
The new process would involve a “synthesizer module” that takes input data representing speech content. The synthesizer would then generate “source acoustic features” to capture the desired voice. The process would then go to the heart of the patent, a “voice convertor” that would be trained to convert acoustic features from ‘a source speaker’ into the player’s character. This would enable the video game to replicate a player’s voice for an even more unique and personal touch for the character.
EA previously filed a similar patent in August 2023. That one aimed at ensuring character voices ‘authentically reflect their age’ as the story progresses. The company appears to be dedicated to enhancing immersive and realistic aspects of video games for players. The technology in these patens holds to potential to make gaming much more personal in narrative–driven games.
Obviously, this could be bad news for voice actors and members of SAG-AFTRA, who voted 98.32% in favor of a strike authorization against video game companies. This doesn’t mean they ARE striking, but means they can if they feel it’s warrented. Some of their biggest contractual sticking points for film and tv work in the 118-day strike this year was about the unregulated and unauthorized use of AI technology in replicating performances. This patent sounds an awful lot like that, and we’re not thrilled about it.
We’ll let you know what we hear about this and other news.
