'The Finals' Is Using AI Voicework And It Is Bad
stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to 
forbes.com
As it turns out, developer Embark Studios is using AI for essentially all the voicework in The Finals.
stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to
That wasn't bad at all, it was decent. I get not getting behind AI to support the VAs but calling that bad is a reach.
I honestly don't get it either, I thought it was all voice acted and was surprised at the customized lines for each team. Didn't even consider that it could be AI
Edit: the clip in the article sounds worse than what I heard in game, not sure if it's been tweaked since then or if I was too busy to notice
This tech is going to be sooo good for the indie scene. Every single game and every character is going to have quality voice work from now on
We need to finally have RPGs where they refer to you by name
thrillho
Played a couple of matches already and I haven't noticed. I don't think it's that big of a deal. The announcers need to relay information about events in the game, but you're focused on other stuff happening and don't really have time to think about their voices.
Yeah I'd just turn it off tbh if I could, its only really good for keeping tabs on other trios.
Isn't that what it's there for?
Yea the gameplay is fun but I'm frankly not a fan of the whole sports theme. The announcers are pretty obnoxious to me.
The biggest issue to me seems to be the model struggling to put emphasis in the right places, but if that's something you can manually tune..
Aside from that, it sounds fine. I would hate to be a VA right now. Maybe it won't kill the field, but it will reduce a lot of job opportunities.
I think it'll change VA's so that their likeness or specific voices they do can be licensed out or paid royalties to.
Wanna make a Machinima with the voice of a videogame character? Sure, build it in Eleven labs based on voice lines you got from the game, but the moment you make money on it a percentage goes to "X" actor or maybe they'd just prefer a one time fee per person to use the voice, idk.
I opened the article planning to dislike it, and I do dislike the man's voice (the woman's voice sounds quite good though), but then I thought about it. Sports announcers actually seem like a decent use for AI. I would imagine that it would be incredibly difficult to build decent announcers from pre-recorded voice lines... It's heavily context-dependent, and this way it can even read out the team names, which I imagine are chosen by the teams. I think this could possibly work well. I don't see how to create a system like this without AI
It's not a generative model running on your graphics card coming up with novel speech to match the gamestate; it would never be fast enough (and you're also using that card to, you know, run the graphics). They're using machine learning to generate speech for their pre-written lines so that they can avoid hiring voice actors. I guess they didn't want to try the old way of having whoever isn't too busy in your office record the lines.
Depending on how many variables/contexts there are in the lines, that could still be a combinatorial nightmare to record.
Yeah I’m not a fan of using AI voice actors but this doesn’t seem like a terrible use. It’s pretty useful for reactions to dynamic events.
Btw the male voice sounds fine to me. It’s the female voice that sounds obviously fake imo
Played it for like six hours last night and I didnt even realize the announcers were AI generated. It can't be that bad if it's passable to those who aren't informed.
Bruh those are rookie numbers. Gotta pump those up.
Tried again today, apparently my wins reclassified me and i got my ass kicked today.
I like to support voice actors, but the headline is exaggeration. The voice is not bad, not as good as a VA, but it's decent.
Generative AI is getting better and better, Voice Actors should definitely start unionizing like writers and force studios to sign against using AIs to replace them.
The article title is misleading. "Quite nice" is misspelled as "Bad".
No it’s not. I’ve played. The voice work was fine. Definitely would prefer if they hired VAs, but it’s not bad in-game.
Honestly expected them to be worse.
Honestly I think that is great. It allows them to easily add stuff down the road. If they add a new gamemode for example that needs new voicelines - easy! Otherwise getting all the VAs in makes things way harder.
That being said, for a singleplayer game that doesn't evolve being changed around all the time I would be a lot more critical.
Ai voice could work for rpgs where they never say your custom name
And for defending the city and its people, i name you Thane XxXPussy_DestroyerXxX of Whiterun
Not just saying your name, imagine having real conversations with characters, or better yet, having the characters come up with their own quest lines for you. Previously meaningless side npcs could in theory end up as a key character in an evolving story. Obviously thats probably a few years off, but it'd be amazing for variety and replayability.
I honestly can’t understand the people defending how it sounds. It sounds terrible. I’d honestly rather they not included the announcers at all and just saved the money. I’ve already disabled all dialogue in the game
Edit: I’m dumb and said this before reading the article. The voices are AI, not the dialogue. I think the voices are totally passable (if obnoxious). The dialogue is what grates against me so
i played a lot on saturday and didn't notice at all.