Ukrainian AI Takes Over Darth Vader Voice From James Earl Jones
James Earl Jones, voice of Star Wars' Darth Vader for nearly 50 years, is relinquishing his role to synthetic speech technology.
According to Vanity Fair(Opens in a new window), the 91-year-old actor cosigned the use of historical voice recordings by Ukrainian start-up Respeecher, which relies on archival recordings and a proprietary AI algorithm to create new dialogue from old voices.
Jones, who's lent his deep timbre to at least a dozen Star Wars entities—most recently this year's Disney+ mini-series Obi-Wan Kenobi—has reportedly been looking to step away from the iconic movie villain at the heart of George Lucas's space opera franchise.
"He had mentioned he was looking into winding down this particular character," Matthew Wood, a 32-year veteran of Lucasfilm, told Vanity Fair. "So how do we move forward?" With Respeecher, apparently.
The company—using artificial intelligence and machine learning to replicate voices and produce synthetic recordings that it says are "indistinguishable from the originals"—previously worked with Lucasfilm and Disney+ to generate the voice(Opens in a new window) of young Luke Skywalker for The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. And, of course, Jones' dark-side antagonist in Obi-wan Kenobi, which provided a rare moment of celebration for Respeecher during the Russian invasion.
"It's been hard," Respeecher CEO Alex Serdiuk said. "A 44-million nation is in pain." Still, the voice-cloning company's employees in Kyiv during Obi-Wan Kenobi's May launch gathered to watch Vader's first appearance and cheer on colleague Bogdan Belyaev, the 29-year-old synthetic-speech artist who brought the audio to life.
"It's a big honor to work with Lucasfilm," he tells Vanity Fair. "I've been a fan of Star
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