Goku’s voice actress’ voice to be converted to AI for “non-acting” projects in Japanese, English

AI project with major anime talent agency will allow for recreation of voice actors’ voices and translation into other languages.

Aoni Production, one of Japan’s most storied anime voice actor talent agencies, has announced a partnership with CoeFont, a Tokyo-based tech company that describes itself as a “global AI voice platform.” Together, the two companies plan to create AI-generated versions of the voices of some of Aoni’s top talent. One of the first will be none other than Masako Nozawa, the voice of Dragon Ball’s Son Goku.

The plan isn’t just to develop a system by which Nozawa’s voice can be replicated to speak Japanese via AI, but also to allow for the veteran voice actress’ voice to be converted to speak other languages, with English and Chinese specifically mentioned in the announcement. The objective, CoeFont says, is to allow for greater use of the voice of familiar anime performers in voice-related services, with the company pointing to voiced technological assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant plus interactive robots, medical equipment, and other devices with voice recognition/navigation functions as potential applications.

Of course, it’s impossible to hear about a plan to use AI to recreate anime voice actors’ voices without wondering if that plan involves eliminating actual voice recording from the anime production process. Aoni and Cofont claim that’s not their intent, though, asserting:

“We would like to clarify that we will not be providing this service for projects related to the field of acting, such as animation production or foreign-language [non-Japanese] dubbing. We will only be developing multilingual AI voices [for projects in] non-acting fields, properly differentiating the activities of AI voice technology and voice actors.”

However, that statement raises the question of what qualifies as “acting.” You could make an argument that “acting” isn’t limited to recording lines of character dialogue to be combined with artwork for anime TV episodes or movies, and that non-narrative narration and voice guidance is itself also a form of voice acting. Then there’s the fact that the entire point of using a popular voice actor in the “non-acting” example applications CoeFont provides would, obviously, be that fans enjoy hearing that actor’s voice. That fondness, though, comes from hearing characters the actor has portrayed, and infusing voice guidance and narration with the same qualities would, once again, require a certain amount of “acting.”

The plan to use the AI-generated voices for other languages adds another perspective to consider, in that it would supersede not only the original Japanese-language performer from the “non-acting” voice work, but also the foreign-language dubbing actor, essentially eliminating two jobs. There’s also the question of how much demand there is among overseas anime fans for English-language dialogue spoken in the voice of Japanese voice actors. Overseas anime enthusiasts who’re also fans of Japanese voice actors got that way by listening to them speak in Japanese, and for anime fans who do desire that characters speak in English, there’s a robust English anime dubbing industry with its own performers and fandom already in place.

Finally, it’s hard to ignore that Aoni, which was founded in 1969, is one of the oldest anime talent agencies and represents a number of veteran performers. Nozawa, for example, is 87 years old, and eventually, she’ll be unable to continue acting. Ordinarily, that would mean the producers of Dragon Ball would be faced with the task of having to recast Goku for the first time in the history of the franchise. Having the means to use AI to make Goku continue speaking in Nozawa’s voice even if they can’t have her in the recording studio seems like it would be an intense temptation, even if the current pledge is that the technology won’t be used that way.

In addition to Nozawa, 75-year-old voice actor Banjo Ginga and eight other as-yet unnamed Aoni Production voice actors will make up the first batch of AI voices in the project.

Source: PR Times, Oricon News via Yahoo! Japan News via Jin
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