> video games won't need voice actors any more and way more fleshed out dialogue
I respectfully disagree. One only has to look at Mass Effect's voice acting for male and female Shepard. It's (almost) exactly the same dialog lines, both performed by humans, but Jennifer Hale just kills it. The voice alone made a lot of players think of Femshep as the canon (despite the male model being present in the box art and most PR media).
I do agree in that we might need less voice actors - but mostly for non-key NPCs. Humans will still play a role.
On that same note, it would not surprise me if non-key NPC's dialog was not written by a human any more, but by a machine. A human "writer" could be replaced by a "chatgpt prompt engineer". But again that will only apply to secondary NPCs.
Honestly, I think we need more voice actors, not less. One of my biggest complaints with the dialogue in Oblivion wasn't the inanity of the "conversations" but the fact that there weren't enough different voices to go around so everyone of same race and sex would sound the same.
I don't really agree. Femshep is way overhyped and maleshep is just fine, if not even more iconic. Femshep sounds like trying too hard to come across as gruff and experienced military veteran and it just doesn't work for me. Comes across as fake.
I believe that the only reason you would write this is because you haven't seen the services that let you train a voice generating AI from a few minutes of your own voice or from a few minutes of another person's audio.
You can already feed this generated responses to say back.
In the near future, humans will play a role, for 5 minutes. We agree on that point. In the also near future, we'll have enough samples for a diverse audience.
My point was that a human will always be able to convey more context via tone and inflection than a machine. Machines will need to use manual context tags like <angry>. At which point you might as well just hire a person to talk to a mike. Machines also noticeably struggle with more nuanced emotions like sarcasm, or disdain, even with tags. That’s all well and good for something like merchants. It’s not good for main characters.
Started playing Mass Effect with Knights of the Old Republic fresh in my mind back in the day. It was so jarring hearing the same voices with different characters.
I respectfully disagree. One only has to look at Mass Effect's voice acting for male and female Shepard. It's (almost) exactly the same dialog lines, both performed by humans, but Jennifer Hale just kills it. The voice alone made a lot of players think of Femshep as the canon (despite the male model being present in the box art and most PR media).
I do agree in that we might need less voice actors - but mostly for non-key NPCs. Humans will still play a role.
On that same note, it would not surprise me if non-key NPC's dialog was not written by a human any more, but by a machine. A human "writer" could be replaced by a "chatgpt prompt engineer". But again that will only apply to secondary NPCs.