Conversations about the ethical use of AI in game development are about to get a whole lot more difficult as Game File reports that CD Projekt worked with AI company Respeecher to modify the game’s Polish voice actor for the upcoming Songs of the Past expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
The actor, Jacek Rozenek, voiced Geralt in the Polish editions of all the Witcher games, including The Witcher 3 and its two expansions, and the Game File report says his performances are highly regarded. But in 2019, he suffered a stroke that left him temporarily unable to speak; by 2021 he had rehabilitated enough to be able to provide some new lines for The Witcher 3’s next-gen update, but the process left him “exhausted.”
Still, he continued to train and was eventually able to return to work, and when CD Projekt decided to make a new Witcher 3 expansion it wanted him back for the role. But the stroke, and the passage of time, had left Rozenek’s voice noticeably changed. Given that Songs of the Past will occur in the midst of The Witcher 3, that shift in tone—”lower [and] gruffer,” according to Game File’s Stephen Totilo—presented a problem.
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So with Rozenek’s permission, CD Projekt approached AI voice company Respeecher to rework his voice for the game. Rozenek is still providing the voice of Geralt in the Polish version of the expansion, but Respeecher is adjusting it to make him sound like he did a decade ago.
“The brief was simple: make Jacek’s voice sound alive, rich and young, like in the original game,” synthetic speech artist Dmytro Vasylets said.
“Getting there took dozens of hours, training models, going through the details with the CDPR team, and dealing with AI artifacts that never fully disappear. The hardest part was Jacek’s emotional range: the half-tones, shouts, groans, anger, fear and laughter. Capturing all of that at the highest audio quality was the real challenge. I’d like to think we pulled it off.”
Rozenek said he feels “very good” about returning to the role of Geralt because he’s so familiar with the character; the issue was merely that his voice was different. Because of that, he’s all in favor of the AI treatment: “The point is that this voice should be as close as possible to my voice from 12 years ago,” he said. “I have great trust…for the creators of this game.”
This isn’t CD Projekt’s first time working with Respeecher: It previously used the company to reproduce the voice of Miłogost Reczek, who portrayed Viktor Vektor and Vesemir in the Polish releases of Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3. Reczek died in 2021; in that case as well, CD Projekt had the family’s blessing to use an AI recreation of the actor’s voice.
The use of generative AI in voice acting is an incredibly thorny issue, one that voice actors have gone to great lengths to maintain some control over. CD Projekt itself has been ambivalent about AI; localization producer Mikołaj Szwed told Game File that “as a person working with voice actors over all the regions in the world, this is a big concern,” although he added that “this was a special case” caused by Rozenek’s health problems. The studio is not planning to do anything similar with the voice of Doug Cockle, who portrays Geralt in the English releases of The Witcher games, Szwed said; Rozenek’s voice would also not be altered in any hypothetical future Witcher games set later in the timeline, because the vocal change would be fine: “It’s more about this specific situation here, where we have both the voice from 12 years ago and from now next to each other.”
Interestingly, the news of Rozenek’s AI-powered vocal overhaul comes just one day after veteran voice actor Stephen Russell appeared in a Nightdive podcast and discussed returning to the role of Garrett in the upcoming Thief: The Dark Project remaster. It’s been more than 20 years since Russell last portrayed the character, in 2004’s Thief: Deadly Shadows, which meant he had to be more conscious of his pitch and delivery while working on content for the new Tarnished Mirror expansion.
But while “the equipment changes,” as Russell said, Rozenek’s stroke was more directly damaging: Totilo said his untouched voice in the expansion “sounds deep and gravelly, noticeably rougher than his recordings for the original game,” while the AI-edited voice is much closer to Rozenek’s voice as it was a decade ago.
