CD Projekt localization director Mikołaj Szwed utilized AI to recreate the voice of the original voice actor, Miłogost Reczek.
Victor Vektor is a ripper doc in the night city of Cyberpunk 2077 whose voice is generated by voice actor Miłogost Reczek.
Unfortunately, Milogost Reczek passed away in 2021. Though the director initially planned to change the voice actor in Phantom Liberty, the idea was not right, and the director changed their plans.
We didn’t like this approach,”
CD Projekt localization director Mikołaj Szwed
The director was pretty much inspired by the voice actor and highly praised Reczek’s voice performance, saying that the voice actor is one of the most talented Polish voice actors while claiming his performance as stellar.
The director decided to pursue the voice-over of Milogost Reczek to pay tribute to the performance of the actor with the use of artificial intelligence.
This way, we could keep his performance in the game and pay tribute to his wonderful performance as Viktor Vektor,”
Szwed
For Cyberpunk 2077 AI voice creation, CDPR used another actor to record the lines of the original actor, generating a voice, then used a tool called Respeecher, developed by a Ukrainian tech company, to clone the voice of Reczek.
Nonetheless, CDPR took consent from the Milogost Reczek family for Cyberpunk 2077 AI voice recreation; however, it’s unclear whether compensation was given or not.
Szwed described that Reczek’s sons “were very supportive.”
The use of AI voice creations is controversial as it replaces the role of professional voice actors in the game; however, a good approach is using AI to generate the voice sound of voice actors after their consent and consequently giving them compensation.
Nonetheless, an unethical approach is using AI voice without consent and compensation, and the voice actors are obviously frightened of this thing.
CDPR redeemed Cyberpunk 2077 with a new expansion, Phantom Liberty, on September 26, while not only an expansion but also an update 2.0 was released for Cyberpunk 2077.
This leads to a boost of Cyberpunk 2077 after the initial downtime of the game, getting over thousands of concurrent players and the expansion Phantom Liberty at the 12th position of top-selling games while the original Cyberpunk 2077 at 10th on Steam.
