The anime gacha game For All Time has replaced its main male character Emerald (Ye Xuan)’s voice with AI dubbing after the original voice actor Jiang Guagntao went absent from all business activities for more than a month.
Jiang was one of the most pronounced voice actors in China and dubbed for protagonists in popular movies such as Titanic (DVD, 1999) and Transformers (2007-2011). Recently, Jiang has become a prominent star in Otome games, a type of visual novel that focuses on fulfilling romantic fantasies with male characters.
Jiang was missing since early July this year, rumored to be arrested for embezzlement and tax evasion. Since then, dozens of projects that collaborated with him, including games and radio drama, had to be halted.
The developers of For All Time decided to collect voice imprints of Jiang from previous recordings and use AI to generate new voice lines for his characters.
An announcement by For All Time, stating the voice replacement with AI
The AI voice was not popular among players. Many felt that the AI voice was “too firm” and broke the immersion of having an intimate exchange with the character, and worried that this would severely demean human voice actor’s work.
One said, “This action just started a new trend. Will it be possible that voice actors don’t need to work anymore in the future?” And another one replied, will AI compete with voice actors for a job?”
Some players are just happy that their favourite character finally has a new voice, but they hope the AI can do more things previously not feasible by real voice actors, such as reading the player’s name.
A fan said: “Should they consider dubbing players’ names to enhance our intimacy?”
Source: Weibo