One of the things limiting modern game design is the use of voice actors. It severely limits the scope of character interaction because dialogue trees have to rely on what they bothered to record. Older games where dialogue was text-based had far more interaction options you could scroll through. AI can greatly expand on what we have, both on the delivery and the wiring. Having a full conversation with an NPC on the politics and economics of the game world, and capping it off by insulting their family lineage would be amazing. But it won't be the technology that's the limiting factor, it's the backlash from those who would be made obsolete by it protesting.
I just don’t believe that it’ll happen, mostly because I don’t believe the studios are nearly as interested in replacing voice actors with AI as you think they are.
There is currently a strike going on against a bunch of AAA game devs nominally for this reason (if you don’t play gacha games, the other reasons don’t matter to you), and I believe that at least the AI portion of the strike will end up resolving in voice actors needing to be compensated for their voices being used in any model for generated voices.
I also don’t think that the demand for fandubbing is nearly as big as you think it is either, mostly because it’s mostly right wingers complaining about the quality and the amount of us who would actually use AI dubs in my opinion is way lower than you think.
AI voice acting is absolutely going to happen in video games because prerecorded speech options simply cannot compete with real-time generated dialogue. Look at BG3, easily the biggest game ever in terms of player choice supported by reams of prerecorded voice acted dialogue. Even then, “conversations” are trite branching systems with a handful of choices per branch.
Contrast this with extremely primitive implementations of chat AI in Skyrim. It’s like night and day. You can talk to companions and npcs alike about anything within the game world and frequently get interesting, reasonable, unique responses. For an interactive medium like video games, there is no comparison. AI is inevitable in gaming.
One of the things limiting modern game design is the use of voice actors. It severely limits the scope of character interaction because dialogue trees have to rely on what they bothered to record. Older games where dialogue was text-based had far more interaction options you could scroll through. AI can greatly expand on what we have, both on the delivery and the wiring. Having a full conversation with an NPC on the politics and economics of the game world, and capping it off by insulting their family lineage would be amazing. But it won't be the technology that's the limiting factor, it's the backlash from those who would be made obsolete by it protesting.
I just don’t believe that it’ll happen, mostly because I don’t believe the studios are nearly as interested in replacing voice actors with AI as you think they are.
There is currently a strike going on against a bunch of AAA game devs nominally for this reason (if you don’t play gacha games, the other reasons don’t matter to you), and I believe that at least the AI portion of the strike will end up resolving in voice actors needing to be compensated for their voices being used in any model for generated voices.
I also don’t think that the demand for fandubbing is nearly as big as you think it is either, mostly because it’s mostly right wingers complaining about the quality and the amount of us who would actually use AI dubs in my opinion is way lower than you think.
AI voice acting is absolutely going to happen in video games because prerecorded speech options simply cannot compete with real-time generated dialogue. Look at BG3, easily the biggest game ever in terms of player choice supported by reams of prerecorded voice acted dialogue. Even then, “conversations” are trite branching systems with a handful of choices per branch.
Contrast this with extremely primitive implementations of chat AI in Skyrim. It’s like night and day. You can talk to companions and npcs alike about anything within the game world and frequently get interesting, reasonable, unique responses. For an interactive medium like video games, there is no comparison. AI is inevitable in gaming.