To craft Cyberpunk 2077‘s immersive world, plenty of voice actors were necessary. CD Projekt Red ran into a problem when Miłogost Reczek, a Polish performer who did the Polish voice acting for Viktor Vektor, passed away in 2021. As revealed by Bloomberg, the studio overcame this setback with the help of artificial intelligence.
In a statement to Bloomberg, the studio explained that when developing the Polish language release of the Phantom Liberty DLC, it considered a few options regarding Vektor’s voice. The studio mulled over replacing Reczek and re-recording his lines in the base game, but as CD Projekt Red localization director Mikołaj Szwed states, this idea was rejected in favor of AI which would keep Reczek’s “performance in the game and pay tribute to his wonderful performance as Viktor Vektor.”
How AI recreated Miłogost Reczek’s voice in Cyberpunk 2077
To recreate Reczek’s voice, CD Projekt Red first hired a new voice actor to record all the necessary lines for Phantom Liberty. Following this, a Ukraine-based voice-cloning software called Respeecher created an algorithm to alter the dialog to sound like Reczek. The use of AI in Phantom Liberty was done with permission from the Reczek family. According to Szwed, Reczek’s sons were very supportive.
This isn’t the first time Respeecher has been used in major AAA games. When developing God of War Ragnarok, Santa Monica had to use the software to keep Sunny Suljic’s voice consistent throughout the development process. Suljic (born 2005) is the voice behind Atreus, and his changing voice was the consequence of a long development cycle extending across his growth spurt.
Though AI can be exceptionally useful in game development, it does come with the possibility that it could permanently replace human voice actors. This has been a concern for SAG-AFTRA, which also represents performers in the gaming industry.
