The Ascent gets more narration with help of AI tool that distorts voice

Cyberpunk game The Ascent will get a lot more spoken dialogues via an update. One voice actor recorded eight hundred lines of text for this. With software from Altered Studio, the voices of forty different characters are made of this.

The eight hundred lines are currently only in the game as written text, but after the update, which appeared on Wednesday, the relevant texts can also be heard as audio. It involves texts of characters that appear in side missions of the game. The primary missions already had narration.

All lyrics are narrated by voice actor Sam Hughes. The lyrics were then adapted with the Altered Studio software, so that it seems as if they were spoken by different actors. In this way, Hughes has recorded forty different voices on his own, without producing different voices.

According to the makers, The Ascent is the first game to use Altered’s speech-to-speech fitting technique. The technique is particularly interesting for smaller developers, who don’t have the resources to hire a separate voice actor for each character in their game.

It is not the first time that voice is adjusted to serve multiple characters in a game. The makers of Watch Dogs: Legion said they would also use such a technique in 2019. It is not known which tool was used for this and to what extent the implementation of Altered Studio deviates from it.

The Ascent was released on Steam and for Xbox consoles earlier this year. The action RPG is based on the cyberpunk theme and received good reviews from both reviewers and players. It is the debut game of Neon Giant, a new studio with twelve employees. The making of The Ascent has also been outsourced to support studios such as Wushu Studios and Sweet Justice Sounds.