Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia: The Misplaced Crown launches subsequent week, however gamers are more likely to encounter an amusing bug as they make their means by the sport, as reported by IGN. One of many recreation’s NPCs is voiced by a text-to-speech program, full with the marginally robotic tones we’ve come to affiliate with these providers.
It’s not fairly Siri or Alexa, however it’s shut and definitely doesn’t match the sport’s Persian-inspired setting. The NPC-in-question is a tree spirit named Kalux and appears to be voiced by a TTS program that’s out there on-line at no cost and sometimes utilized by streamers.
This isn’t an “AI is coming in your jobs” kind factor, however reasonably a mistake on Ubisoft’s half, as every different NPC is hooked up to a voice actor. IGN notes that Kalux doesn’t have a voice actor within the credit. Moreover, Kalux solely has just a few strains, so it probably gained’t be a troublesome repair to assign an actor to ship that dialogue. Ubisoft has readied a day-one patch, however it gained’t deal with the Kalux problem. Search for one other patch in late January or early February that replaces the bot with a human.
Ubisoft confirmed the error and mentioned that the “English model of those eight strains of textual content for this character weren’t correctly carried out,” occurring to notice that the sport has greater than 12,000 strains of dialogue throughout a number of languages. Recreation builders typically use TTS providers and AI voices to create placeholder dialogue, which is finally changed by human actors. The corporate simply forgot to deal with this one character.
Prince of Persia: The Misplaced Crown releases on January 15 for almost each platform on the market, together with the Nintendo Change and PC. It’s the primary franchise installment since 2010’s Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands. This can be a Metroidvania-style platformer that brings the collection again to its 2D roots. Evaluations are largely optimistic, with many praising it for providing a real AAA Metroidvania expertise within the spirit of Nintendo’s recent-ish Metroid Dread.
Nevertheless, simply because this specific occasion was a mistake, doesn’t imply that AI-enhanced TTS providers aren’t going to transform the business. CD Projekt Purple lately used AI to incorporate a deceased actor’s voice in Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty and SAG-AFTRA lately struck a take care of an AI voice appearing platform to make it simpler for actors to license their voice as a digital reproduction to be used in video games.