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Ubisoft Accidentally Used Text-to-Speech To Voice a Character in the New Prince of Persia Game (engadget.com) 25

Posted by msmash from the oops dept.
Ubisoft's Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown launches next week, but players are likely to encounter an amusing bug as they make their way through the game. Engadget: One of the game's NPCs is voiced by a text-to-speech program, complete with the slightly robotic tones we've come to associate with these services. It's not quite Siri or Alexa, but it's close and certainly doesn't fit the game's Persian-inspired setting. The NPC-in-question is a tree spirit named Kalux and seems to be voiced by a TTS program that's available online for free and typically used by streamers.

This isn't an "AI is coming for your jobs" type thing, but rather a mistake on Ubisoft's part, as each and every other NPC is attached to a voice actor. IGN notes that Kalux doesn't have a voice actor in the credits. Additionally, Kalux only has a few lines, so it likely won't be a tough fix to assign an actor to deliver that dialogue. Ubisoft has readied a day-one patch, but it won't handle the Kalux issue. Look for another patch in late January or early February that replaces the bot with a human.
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Ubisoft Accidentally Used Text-to-Speech To Voice a Character in the New Prince of Persia Game More

Ubisoft Accidentally Used Text-to-Speech To Voice a Character in the New Prince of Persia Game

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  • union needs to file an grievance! (Score:3)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Friday January 12, 2024 @01:02PM (#64153441)

    union needs to file an grievance!

    • Why? They can't bar me from using AI for creating my games. Society just has to change and deal with many people not having a job due to AI, robots and automation. Or should we ban email because it puts mailmen out of a job, or ban weavingmachines because it put a lot of people out of a job.

  • Everspace 2 did this in early access before they hired voice actors just to have SOME voice in there. One of the characters, however, actually is an AI, and the fans ended up requesting that the TTS version of his lines was kept for launch since it fit him quite well.

  • not an accident (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Osgeld ( 1900440 ) on Friday January 12, 2024 @01:17PM (#64153487)

    They didn't accidently use it for a voice, they accidently left it in there

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by darkain ( 749283 )

      100% this. During game development (or really any software development), placeholder content is very commonly used. This is essentially a Lorem Ipsum, but for voice, that got missed during release build. During development, you'll see this all the time, like placeholder textures, or placeholder text, or placeholder whatevers. And its also quite common to use placeholder content that is close to final content, so in this case, a sound file with the voice, just not done by a human. Simple mistake to overlook

      • if that were the case, they would have said "oops, forgot to replace the tts audio file with the real one" and submitting a patch would be quick and trivial.

        rather what happened is "oops, we forgot to hire someone to actually record the audio to replace the tts audio". whether that was an honest mistake or intentional is left as an exercise to the reader

    • "Accidently"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by stikves ( 127823 )

      Agreed.

      It is the "negative" act of leaving out, not putting in.

      During development all audio could be first "synthesized". As all / most textures will be missing, and graphics, too will be in wireframe.

      This is not very different than shipping code that has "DO NOT SHIP" in it.

      No need to make a larger deal, proclaiming "the end is nigh", especially when that voice could easily be recognized as "robotic".

    • And who cares? Why does it need a human voice? Are we also going to say that all video game characters must be 100% motion capture of humans, rather than any form of animation engine?

  • Tree spirit or not (Score:4, Funny)

    by Growlley ( 6732614 ) on Friday January 12, 2024 @01:28PM (#64153525)
    still not an excuse for woodern acting,
  • They could instead spend that money building something new, but NO...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      New isn't necessarily better. I don't know this game, and remakes often botch things, but "classic stories" and games are hard to better. None of the games competing with chess have surpassed it in it's particular domain. "Prince of Persia" has been a successful game for multiple decades. It's not likely that a "new game" would be as successful.

  • Will they hire George Carlin? (Score:3)

    by drainbramage ( 588291 ) on Friday January 12, 2024 @02:24PM (#64153729) Homepage

    Just waiting for them to hire George Carlin for this voice work.
    From earlier: https://entertainment.slashdot... [slashdot.org]

  • Well, Ent that special?

  • I immediately thought of game character interactions that sounded like this:

    https://youtu.be/b2F-DItXtZs?s... [youtu.be]

  • This was just a crappy AI service if it still sounds robotic. Seeing how deepfakes etc are sounding really good, there is no need for robotic sounding NPC's (unless ofcourse it is a robot, haha). The only ones who would care about AI being used to voice characters are voice-actors, but gamers themselves wouldn't give a damn. As we regular people had and will have to deal with our jobs being taken over by automation, AI, robots, why should I care about a voice-actor? If a game(or even a movie/series) can be

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Amnenth ( 698898 )

      It sounds like this was a case of placeholder lines getting overlooked and not being replaced by an actual actor.

      The placeholder lines probably exist so that actors can hear the dialogue of other characters they'll be sharing scenes with, or so that the scenes themselves can be set up before all recordings are finalized.

      On top of that, it's a plain TTS system, not intended to sound indistinguishable from a real person.

      • That's what my original thought was also. For development of the game, this makes perfectly sense. And in the end you just replace the dialog that was actually kept in the game, making the voicerecording much more streamlined without any unnecessary lines having been recorded, which ofcourse cost money.

  • No voice on this retro DOS game, just the horifying digital splutter sound as you got squished in the piercer...

    Oh did I enjoy this back in the day:
    https://www.retrogames.cz/play... [retrogames.cz]

  • This doesn't surprise me as I'm still salty about a gamebreaking bug I encountered in one of the newer (non-DOS, maybe Sands of Time) Prince of Persia games years ago. A trigger didn't execute and/or a door didn't open and I was softlocked and unable to continue the game. My saved games were too close to the event so I had to give up on this game that I bought where I was halfway through. Fuck you, Ubisoft, this is why you don't get my money anymore.

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