Access to good vocal talent can be one of the biggest hurdles for ambitious modders and machinima artists. Now, one Skyrim filmmaker hopes to make that hurdle a little easier to overcome by using entirely machine-learning synthesized dialogue in their Elder Scrolls fan trailer.
YouTuber Adriac has been making fan-films for everything from Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare to HBO’s Chernobyl for about a year. But as spotted by PCGamesN, the amateur filmmaker’s latest is a break from the norm in that, rather than splicing together out-of-context voice lines, their Skyrim trailer features entirely new dialogue.
Without access to Bethesda’s vocal talent, Adriac instead remixed existing voice lines from across the developer’s catalogue using AI-powered synthesis tool xVASynth. Trained from audio pulled directly from the game, the tool lets you compile and tweak entirely bespoke lines of dialogue for Skyrim’s sorta-Scandinavian accented inhabitants. Within reason, at least—on Reddit, Adriac noted that anything over 5 seconds “makes the A.I crap itself”.
Now, I don’t think professional voice actors have too much to worry about. While it’s a hell of a feat, the audio still has the stilted, nasally quality of computer-generated audio, with a little bit of fuzziness
