Fortnite will soon be rolling out its plan to add AI-generated voices to its non-playable characters (NPCs).
Epic Games has announced that it has now added “consistent voices and personas” to 36 existing Fortnite characters when they’re used as NPCs, and says more will come over time.
This means if the characters are encountered in the game, they will now speak to the player in an AI-generated voice.
The main purpose for this is Epic’s upcoming ‘conversations’ feature, which it plans to take out of its experimental phase at the end of the month and roll out from July 30.
When it rolls out, users who create Fortnite islands will be able to add their own AI-powered NPCs who can have real-time conversations with the player, powered by Google‘s Gemini AI.
When it announced the conversations feature back in April, Epic said: “Instead of authoring dialogue trees for characters in your islands, conversations transforms an NPC into an AI-powered character capable of unscripted dialogue and interactions with players, like a quest giver or narrator.
“You define who the character is with simple prompts – how they think, what they know, and how they behave – and then select a voice that matches their persona.”
Now 36 of these characters – all of which are original Fortnite characters like Fishstick, Haylee Skye, Cuddle Team Leader and The Imagined – have had their voices and personas locked down by Epic so they “sound and react in a way you’d expect right out of the box”.
“Independent professional actors”
According to Epic, each character’s AI voice is “powered by performances captured from independent professional actors specifically for use in developer-made islands”.
“The actors agreed to have their performances used to develop voice models that create the spoken responses for these LLM-powered Fortnite characters. Our next step is to work with the relevant guilds and character voice actors who have previously worked on Fortnite Battle Royale to explore opportunities to make their original voices available across the Fortnite ecosystem.”
Fortnite has experimented with AI voices in the past, with mixed results. The game added a Darth Vader chatbot during one of its seasons last year – this allowed players to interact with the character, who responded with the iconic voice of late actor James Earl Jones.
This naturally led to players trying to ‘break’ the chatbot’s restrictions by tricking Vader into swearing or saying otherwise inappropriate things.
Epic said Jones’s AI-powered voice was used with permission from his family, but American actors’ labour union SAG-AFTRA criticised the practice, arguing that the tool still took work away from other actors who could’ve voiced the character in his video game form, such as those who voiced Vader in previous games”.
It’s not clear whether Epic’s statement that its AI voices were supplied by “independent professional actors” means these actors aren’t part of SAG-AFTRA or any other actors’ union.
