Players Voicing Game Characters is EA's New Idea for Involved Gaming
Electronic Arts wants to allow players to voice game characters. The company registered the idea with the United States Patent Office some time ago.
What do you think about doing your own voiceover for video game characters? Perhaps this can be made a reality with an idea from Electronic Arts. New patent of the company, filed on October 17 with the US Patent Office, presents details of a special system that assigns player voices to digital characters.
The system in question has no specific name - the document refers to it as "generating speech using the player's voice in a video game." As can be read in the description accompanying the patent, the invention is "a computer-implemented method for generating speech audio a video game. The method includes inputting, into a synthesizer module, input data that represents speech content."
In addition to description of the solution's functions, EA presented a simplified graphic that shows how it works.
As you can see in the image above, the recorded voice goes directly to the synthesizer, which will also include "styles" of speech. The device then converts the spoken sentences and transfers them to vocoder, from which the player's "customized" voice flows. A more detailed description of how this system works can be found directly in the patent documents.
If in the future such a solution makes its way into games and fans en masse begin to put their voices to game characters in order to feel "familiar," professional actors may have a whole new reason to worry.
Recall that recently actors have been fighting hard against companies or ordinary people using artificial intelligence that appropriates their voices. For example let's take Roger Clark, playing the role of Arthur Morgan (Red Dead Redemption 2), or Victoria Atkin playing Evie Frye (Assassin's Creed: Syndicate). If only for this reason, the game industry may be affected vt a massive strike of voice actors.
