How a Massive UK Game Company is Utilizing TTS AI Voiceovers for Rapid Iteration at a Lower Cost
*For confidentiality purposes, I cannot share the names of the company or the title until it is released. But I bet if you have not played their games yet, you have at least heard them being mentioned in the annual gaming awards’ nominee lists.
As a former RPG-nerd (and a current fan of the FIFA, AC, and the Uncharted series), I’m personally enthralled by this newly formed partnership. We’ve had a music record label, a giant US movie production firm, and small indie game studios use our voices in the past, but this is the first time LOVO voices are actually going to be used in the narration and NPC voices of a well-established gaming franchise.
But really, the problems the gaming industry have been facing were clear:
- How can you get hundreds of voices to use for NPCs without renting out tens of recording studios and breaking bank?
- How do you get the main narration in 10 different languages, and edit them multiple times through game development, production, and post-release?
More specifically for this release, it was:
How do we get hundreds of voices with scrips as short as “Oh!” to as long as a 5-minute tutorial in a 10 different languages without setting up studios and managers in several countries?
and; how do we create the main narration of the game that we change over and over throughout the production, and even after the game has launched?
So what are they doing actually?
After testing out a few options (let’s be honest, there are a lot of TTS companies out there, starting with Google, Amazon, and IBM, not to mention other startups) they decided to leverage LOVO’s AI voices via Text to Speech API to generate, edit, and automatically upload audio files into their dev environment.
This cuts the cost AND production time by more than 99%, including not only the actual VO fee but the overhead to search talent, set up recording booths, and manage finished audio + bottleneck in game development.
We are super excited to see how this game turns out, and will be sure to follow its release!
When the dust settles down a bit and we receive the green-light from our partner to disclose everything, I’ll make sure to come back and share it with you all :)
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions about our voices, our web application LOVO Studio, or our API!
Originally published at https://www.lovo.ai on December 17, 2020.
