CD Projekt Red to Use AI to Alter Geralt's Voice in New Expansion
Polish actor Jacek Rozenek will return as Geralt in Songs of the Past. With his consent, new lines will be processed by Respeecher to match his 2014 recordings.
CD Projekt Red has decided to use the Respeecher tool to process Jacek Rozenek's voice in the new expansion for The Witcher 3 — Songs of the Past. The actor will once again voice Geralt in Polish, but his voice has noticeably changed following a stroke.
Rozenek suffered a stroke in 2019 and was unable to speak for some time. In 2021, he recorded several lines for the 2022 update of The Witcher 3, though his recovery was difficult. To return to work, the actor spent many hours training his voice.
Developers invited Rozenek to the studio about a year ago and discovered that his voice now sounds deeper and more hoarse. This could have stood out sharply against the thousands of Geralt's lines recorded by him in 2014, especially in scenes where new phrases are heard alongside old ones.
The Respeecher model was trained on Rozenek's recordings from the original game. According to company specialist Dmytro Vasyltsa, the work took dozens of hours: the team trained the models, adjusted the results together with CD Projekt Red, and eliminated synthetic speech artifacts. The company emphasized that they would not alter the actor's voice using AI without his direct permission.
Songs of the Past will add a new story about Geralt to the game, set roughly in the same period as the events of the main campaign. The expansion will also expand the character's lines in existing locations. For The Witcher 4, where Rozenek is also expected to return to the role, such a tool, according to a source, will not be necessary: the older and more rugged image of Geralt aligns better with his changed timbre.
