EA Patent Explores Idea To Let Players Voice Game Characters

EA has published a patent for an idea that lets players voice in-game characters. The title of the said patent says ‘Generating Speech in the Voice of a Player of a Video Game’ and was filed on October 28, 2020.

According to the patent document, it will be a ‘computer-implemented method of generating speech audio in a video game is provided. The method includes inputting, into a synthesizer module, input data that represents speech content. Source acoustic features for the speech content in the voice of a source speaker are generated and are input, along with a speaker embedding associated with a player of the video game into an acoustic feature encoder of a voice converter.’

As first reported by Very Ali Gaming, this patent will allow players to make their in-game characters talk to each other with their own voices.

In theory, this does sound interesting and makes gaming more personalized. This will not only impact story-driven games but also make online multiplayer games from Battle Royale, MMO, to team-based shooters even more interactive.

How this will consider the recording quality, voice-over skill, background noise, curse words, characters of various races/genders in-game, and various languages, remains to be seen. Moreover, it has some clear downsides with people’s real voices possibly being used for unsavory purposes online and how it may affect the jobs of voice-over artists.

It’s worth noting that a patent doesn’t necessarily mean that the feature is already under development or about to be released – it could merely be an idea that Electronic Arts is planning to work on in the future.

Would you be interested in voicing your own character in-game or is this a type of future that is futile? Let us know your opinions.

Speaking of patents, big companies seem to be secretly working on various new features because Activision has patented an idea to suggest video games based on a user’s livestream viewing.