Straight4 Appears To Have Patented AI Generated Voices in Gaming

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find the patent listed online yet, which is what I was waiting for, but enough details appear to be available now that we can get a good idea of what this is about.

It started recently when Ian Bell posted on Twitter about a patent filing his new company was doing that he said would be “game changing”. This led up to another post on Thursday which linked the following YouTube video:

View this video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/e5BpjzCsYfk and please consider subscribing to RSC’s channel.

That’s pretty impressive. Not just because it’s clearly not really Mike Joy saying those things, but because of the possibilities. While the early comments I saw were discussing how distracting this might be, that did seem to completely overlook other applications. Crewchiefs? Strategists? Spotters? There is constant discussion between the driver and others during racing events and while I can see commentary teams being an amazing addition to replays that’s not the big picture here. This belief was solidified in me when yesterday Ian shared another video featuring Ben Collins AI-generated voice doing the role of a race engineer:

View this video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/uwHu4RQyUy4 and please consider subscribing to RSC’s channel.

The potential for application here seems pretty huge and I’m curious just how far reaching it is. I’d have loved to be able to find a link to the patent at this point to know for sure, but what about other sports? What about the next Elder Scrolls franchise game NPCs? Or FIFA? I play Escape from Tarkov (a gritty first-person shooter game) quite a bit and I’m wondering about the potential applications there, too. What if that NPC reacted appropriately to the weird decisions you were making instead of through a completely canned response?

The biggest question, perhaps, is just how much an AI generating bot on your local machine will add to the load any software running it brings. But my first thought there is that maybe the realtime generation doesn’t always have to be realtime at all. What if when I start a Skyrim-like game it takes my character design choices into account and then generated AI versions of ‘canned’ dialogue to give me a completely unique gameplay experience? What if when I start a race session it automatically AI generated x number of different ways to react when (not if) I crash?

At this time Straight4 haven’t completely confirmed that this tech will be in the previously announced GTR Revival, but I certainly hope so. I’ll keep my eyes out for that patent filing online, too.