• @mindbleach
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    16 months ago

    Why would I want a fictional character to sound like a specific real person?

    Or, framing the question differently: what actor plays Dave The Diver onscreen? Because the answer is what this technology will do for audio.

    • 2xsaiko
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      16 months ago

      There are cool use cases for this such as having NPCs say player-picked names for their character (instead of saying a generic name/title like in current RPGs). I don’t know if it’s worth it though.

      • @mindbleach
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        16 months ago

        Again: why would the NPC saying that need to sound like a specific real person?

        • 2xsaiko
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          16 months ago

          To make it sound like the rest of the character’s dialogue. They’re probably not going to train this on the VA’s “normal” voice, that sounds useless.

          • @mindbleach
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            16 months ago

            Again: why would an NPC’s dialog need to sound like any specific real person, doing a voice?

            • 2xsaiko
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              16 months ago

              Are you suggesting replacing voice actors with a completely computer generated voice, for all voice lines? That hasn’t sounded good ever, especially in terms of intonation and emotions.

              • @mindbleach
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                16 months ago

                That’s what this already does.

                We are talking about a completely computer-generated voice. But for some reason we’re only talking about cases where it’s modeled as closely as possible on one specific human being.

                • 2xsaiko
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                  16 months ago

                  Sure, and if it purely takes text as input and you use it to make voices for an entire game it’s going to be bad too. I’m talking about supplementing voices with snippets that they can’t know in advance, such as the player name.

                  • @mindbleach
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                    16 months ago

                    I’m talking about artists using these tools for how characters sound, the same way they use tools for how characters look and move. The answer to “who plays Mario onscreen?” is “nobody.” The answer to “who voices Mario?” can be the same. It doesn’t mean nobody is responsible for how he sounds, or that someone typed “short plumber red hat” to render him.