Hey all, I’m back with an interesting topic for this week’s Video Game Tuesday. It’s all about AI Generated Voices in Games.

A couple months ago the world lost one of its more prolific actors, and one who was a major voice actor for gaming as well. Of course, I’m speaking about Lance Reddick, who has voiced Commander Zavala (shown above left) in Destiny since it first launched its Alpha. But he also voiced Sylens (shown at top of page) in the Horizon series and given that it just had a DLC release last month, and the series is definitely shaping up to have another full-fledged release, Sylens is very likely going to be a major character there as well.

So how does AI come into this?: AI has come a very long way in the past couple years, and AI can now handle creating brand new lines using a person’s voice pretty well if they have enough data to work off of. Given how prolific Lance was, there’s plenty of data to work with.

Well, I think it’d be worth thinking about, maybe to honor a long-standing video game series voice actor like Lance Reddick who passed too soon. This is especially true when they voice a beloved character in a series, and the use of AI would allow the developers of those games to continue using the departed as the voice of that character. Of course, I’d advocate that this be okayed by the family of the departed because this isn’t something you just do without approval, but for someone whose character was never recast in over a decade I can’t help but feel it’d be a great way to honor Lance Reddick by using AI to help him continue voicing Zavala, and potentially Sylens, even after his passing.

Maybe that’s just callous of me, but it’s a thought I had almost immediately after learning about Lance’s passing. Leave thoughts down in the comments below if you think it’s a valid idea or if you disagree.