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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: December 20th, 2023

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  • I wouldnt pay extra for an AI version of an actor I liked.

    If course. It is about paying less after all.
    The actor decided to get some passive income by licensing their TTS and someone used it as they wanted. That’s all there is to it.

    Apart from maybe, being able to get the AI to create different accented versions of a VA (which, said VA doesn’t do otherwise), the AI voice will mostly be of a lower grade than a good VA. Which is what makes it unfit for foreground roles, which the user will be actively listening to.
    You definitely don’t want cutscenes to be filled with half-assed rubbish, which might be otherwise, fine for background chatter, where it is just filling the silence. And in cases where the background chatter is a part of the experience and the devs care about it, they will be getting active VAs like they currently do. There are more perfectionists in artistic fields than one would expect.









  • The system you described would mean only the biggest names get paid

    Rather, it’s more like, we as the user get a greater variety of background NPC banter, for the same game price.

    Take X4 for instance. The only banter we get is different types of “hello”.
    Only in cases of quests, is there any dialogue variety. When there is any such banter out of quests, it’s mostly incoherent (or was that another game, I need to check again).
    It doesn’t really make sense that 2 or more people meet in a docking area, say, “Hi”, “Hello”, “Good day to you” and then just keep on standing staring at each other’s faces as if they were using some sort of telepathy, or just staring at each other without any conversation.
    It would be fun to be able to have conversations that, while clear that they would not be able to yield any Quest, should still have variety enough to be fun when the player stops by, eavesdropping.
    This sort of thing is there in a lot of games by high budget studios, while at the same time, the games have pretty large file sizes.
    This way, we can reduce both production and distribution costs.

    And the VAs, they don’t need to do all the work of speaking each dialogue every time the story writers come up with new banter, but the studio will be getting their voice for those lines, essentially increasing the value of the licensed TTS package, meaning the VA gets more work done than the work they do and gets paid more (well, the last part depends more upon the market condition).



  • The content is… AI assisted (maybe a better way to put it).
    And yes, now you don’t need to get the VA every time you add a line, as long as the License for the TTS data holds.

    You still want to be having proper VAs for lead roles though. Or you might end up with empty feeling dialogues. Even though AI tends to put inflections and all, from what I have seen, it’s not good enough to reproduce proper acting.
    Of course that would mean that those who cannot do the higher quality acting [1] will be stuck with only making the TTS files, instead of getting lead roles.

    But that will mean that now, places where games could not afford to add voice, they now can. Specially useful for cases where someone is doing a one dev project.

    Even better if there can be an open standard format for AI training compatible TTS data. That way, a VA can just pay a one time fee to a tech, to create that file, then own said file and licence it whichever way they like.


    1. e.g. most Anime English dubs. I have seen a few exceptions, but they are few enough to call exceptions ↩︎




  • A really good place would be background banter. Greatly reducing the amount of extra dialogues the devs will have to think of.

    1. Give the AI a proper scenario, with some Game lore based context, applicable to each background character.
    2. Make them talk to each other for around 5-10 rounds of conversation.
    3. Read them, just to make sure nothing seems out of place.
    4. Bundle them with TTS for each character sound type.

    Sure, you’ll have to make a TTS package for each voice, but at the same time, that can be licensed directly by the VA to the game studio, on a per-title basis and they too, can then get more $$$ for less work.






  • You’re right, but at the same time.

    Let’s say a website has an issue and was one time faulty. Clients lost money. Then the site owner is notified of the fault by multiple clients. The site owner uses some words to placate them and goes on with their day.

    The site owner then makes some changes to the site, meaning they did have the time and money to pay a developer to update the site, but decides to keep the previous bug in, as a feature, implemented in a different way, this time better at stealing their money.


    Sure, the obvious solution is to use another site (the laundromat down the road).


    Anti Commercial AI License - CC BY-NC-SA 4.0