I can't decide on this one.
I have one foot kicking about in the past where your character was never voiced, and all the usual arguments to support that, and my other foot is kicking around in the near future where voice actors are now robot voices that mimic human speech and inflection perfectly, with only plain text and some standardized extra notation like a music score to define pacing, pauses, drawn-out pronunciations, and other wee bits that tend to put character into speech.
With intelligent text to real speech software, for any language, any accent, any voice, there very well could be a several different voices to choose from, with preferred regional accent, as well as personal personality quirks of speech to choose from for a custom, near-unique character build, just like you're choosing face, hair, and other physical options.
All that could potentially come without much extra bloat to game size, without the requirement of prerecorded dialogue as the intelligent speech proggy could run off a plain text script with variation of pseudo-musical notation to define gender, pitch, pacing, language, accent, and all those other variables.
I think that technology is only in the demonstration phase now and leaking into the deep fake market, however that works, but, as the technology advances in sophistication, we could very well see it applied to gaming for, unique, voiced characters.
While this could potentially cut costs and development times, I'm going to feel a wee bit sad for all the voice actors that will have to find another profession and/or compete in an ever shrinking market taken over by machines.
I have one foot kicking about in the past where your character was never voiced, and all the usual arguments to support that, and my other foot is kicking around in the near future where voice actors are now robot voices that mimic human speech and inflection perfectly, with only plain text and some standardized extra notation like a music score to define pacing, pauses, drawn-out pronunciations, and other wee bits that tend to put character into speech.
With intelligent text to real speech software, for any language, any accent, any voice, there very well could be a several different voices to choose from, with preferred regional accent, as well as personal personality quirks of speech to choose from for a custom, near-unique character build, just like you're choosing face, hair, and other physical options.
All that could potentially come without much extra bloat to game size, without the requirement of prerecorded dialogue as the intelligent speech proggy could run off a plain text script with variation of pseudo-musical notation to define gender, pitch, pacing, language, accent, and all those other variables.
I think that technology is only in the demonstration phase now and leaking into the deep fake market, however that works, but, as the technology advances in sophistication, we could very well see it applied to gaming for, unique, voiced characters.
While this could potentially cut costs and development times, I'm going to feel a wee bit sad for all the voice actors that will have to find another profession and/or compete in an ever shrinking market taken over by machines.