AI Startup Aims to Give Voice Actors a Digital Twin

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Over the years, Cissy Jones, a voice actor with many credits, including video games Starfield and Baldur's Gate III, has performed countless fictional mishaps. Death by gunshot, she said, is easy. Whereas death by fire can be long and tedious. One time, she played an astronaut in space who woke up breathing tensely. Ten minutes into the scene, Jones says she came close to passing out.

“Imagine your paycheck being dependent upon being able to sustain that,” Jones said

If Jones and her business partners succeed, sometime soon she may no longer have to. Such work, she said, will simply be outsourced to her “digital twin,” a vocal doppelganger powered by artificial intelligence.

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Jones is the co-founder and vice president of strategic partnerships at Morpheme, a startup aiming to harness artificial intelligence to reshape how vocal performances are used in everything from animated series to video games. It's the kind of venture that lately has tech investors excited — and all manner of creative professionals, from screenwriters to actors, on edge. Within the video-game industry, workers are concerned that AI could eliminate entire job categories, such as quality-assurance testers.

Morpheme's AI software records audio from actors and then creates a model of their voice that can be used to alter, expand and enliven future productions. Recently, Morpheme has been demonstrating the technology to entertainment businesses, including several top gaming companies that it declined to identify, citing nondisclosure agreements.

Among other features, Morpheme is developing a library of exertion sounds, such as heavy breathing or shrieking, that clients will be able to reuse throughout the development