[ggregoire]

> I told her then that the industry would be disrupted by AI before she retired.

Yes. I just discovered there is a text-to-speech addon [1] (now a few months old) for World of Warcraft that adds voices for every NPC in the game... It is so impressive and game changer (pun intended) that I naively asked in the chat of the Twitch stream I was watching "when did Blizzard add voices to the NPCs??". For an instant I really thought Blizzard contracted actors, but no, someone like you and me just used AI to generate realistic voices for every character in the game. I don't think it's ready yet to completely replace actors in video games (surely it will in the near future tho) but voice acting is something so expensive to do that I can see studios and developers in 2024 already use this tech for all the optional dialogues and secondary characters' voices.

[1] https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/voiceover

[freedomben]

I've wondered at what point this would happen. I think it could now, but from what I've read the voice actor unions are able to prevent it currently (at least for AAA games or non-indie devs). Many of them have agreements/contracts in place for the foreseeable future, and being the first big company to replace them is a heap of terrible press that nobody is going to want to touch. I think it's the same reason Hollywood reached the AI agreement recently too.

[GaggiX]

I think that there are a lot of voice actors that are not unionized tho. And games like The Finals already use AI for many voices.

[lyu07282]

Another recent example, the finals uses AI voice generation for realtime game announcements

https://youtu.be/kZ87wiHps9s