Voice acting in video games isn’t often discussed unless a performance is good or bad. After all, many people just focus on what’s being said within the video games and don’t always pay attention to the actors themselves. That’s sad, given that voice actors work hard to do these lines, and when you don’t get a quality voice actor, the game can suffer. That brings us to a unique patent that was found by Very Ali Gaming belonging to Electronic Arts. According to the patent, they’re trying to create a device that would let YOU become a voice actor for the game you’re playing.
Here’s the official description of the device via the Reddit post:
“A computer-implemented method of generating speech audio in a video game is provided. 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.”
In other words, you’ll be speaking into a device, which will copy your voice patterns and replicate it into the video game where your character will talk like you! It’s definitely a unique thing to attempt, and we’re curious about how well it would work. But as Redditors were happily noting, this isn’t something that everyone should be happy about in certain ways.
First off, not everyone would WANT to have their voice being played in a video game. That’s not to say that everyone “has a bad voice,” that’s not the message here. It’s simply that they know their voice wouldn’t “fit” in a video game, and it could be distracting hearing their voice alongside trained professionals who work hard to deliver the right effect of a line.
Second, some people are worried that this could take jobs away from voice actors, who have already had a hard time in the industry and have even gone on strike alongside the actors in Hollywood. After all, if there isn’t a need for a “voiced protagonist” because the player could be that voice, then that’s one less job for Electronic Arts to look for.
Yes, this could be jumping the gun a bit, but it should also be kept in mind. After all, EA has done very controversial things in the past, and they’re always up for pushing the envelope beyond where it should be pushed.
