Summary
CD Projekt worked with the AI company Respeecher so that Jacek Rozenek, the Polish voice of Geralt of Rivia, could record new dialogue for The Witcher 3 expansion Songs of the Past and have it matched to his performance in the original game, Game File reported on 11 November. Rozenek records every line himself, and the software adjusts the recordings afterwards. Rozenek has played Geralt in Polish since the series began. He recorded some 10,000 lines in 2014 for The Witcher 3, a game that has sold more than 65 million copies, and continued in the role for the 2015 expansion Hearts of Stone and 2016’s Blood and Wine. In 2019 he had a stroke, and for months he could not speak. In 2021, as his speech returned, he recorded lines for a quest added to the next-gen update to The Witcher 3, which was released in 2022. “I was so exhausted after this recording,” Rozenek said, speaking in Polish through a translator in an interview with Game File. Getting his voice back into working condition took six or seven hours of training a day. Rozenek said the recovery helped him relate to Geralt’s work: “Now I can understand what the Witcher’s work actually is.” VGC reported that he returned to voice acting in 2022. Why the studio tested his voice first About a year ago, CD Projekt Red invited Rozenek to its studio to hear how he sounded. Songs of the Past, announced publicly in May, tells a story set around the same time as The Witcher 3 and is attached to the base game, so newly recorded dialogue would sit next to lines recorded a decade earlier. Mikołaj Szwed, CD Projekt’s localization director, said the expansion also adds “reactions, battle cries, one-liners” and more that play in pre-existing Witcher 3 areas. “We invited Jacek to our studios to kind of see how his voice sounds now,” Szwed said. “It was important for us to see how much the voice of Jacek had changed, because of both the time and also because of his condition.” The session confirmed a mismatch. Game File reported that Rozenek’s voice was lower and gruffer than before, and reporter Stephen Totilo, who was given a work-in-progress Polish-language demo of the expansion by the studio, wrote that the untouched voice “sounds deep and gravelly, noticeably rougher than his recordings for the original game,” as quoted by PC Gamer. CD Projekt’s developers were concerned that players would find the switch between the two versions of the voice jarring from scene to scene. Rozenek, who gave his consent for the work, backed the decision. He said he feels “very good” about returning to the role because he knows the character so well, and that the problem was his voice rather than the performance. “The point is that this voice should be as close as possible to my voice from 12 years ago,” he said. “I have great trust…for the creators of this game.” How the lines are processed The performance stays with the actor. Rozenek recorded all of his new lines for Songs of the Past as he would have done before, and the files were then sent to Respeecher, which matched them to how he sounded in the base game. The AI tools used were trained on his own earlier voice work, VGC reported. “We basically delivered to Respeecher all the lines that Jacek recorded for us for The Witcher 3,” Szwed said in comments reported by VGC. “They created an algorithm of his voice, based on his lines.” Synthetic speech artist Dmytro Vasylets described the task set by the studio. “The brief was simple: make Jacek’s voice sound alive, rich and young, like in the original game,” he said in remarks reported by PC Gamer. “Getting there took dozens of hours, training models, going through the details with the CDPR team, and dealing with AI artifacts that never fully disappear,” Vasylets said. “The hardest part was Jacek’s emotional range: the half-tones, shouts, groans, anger, fear and laughter. Capturing all of that at the highest audio quality was the real challenge. I’d like to think we pulled it off.” That workflow differs from consumer software that will generate a synthetic voiceover from typed text, where no human take sits behind the audio. In the Witcher 3 expansion, the timing, emphasis and emotion come from a recorded session, and the model changes the timbre. Those consumer tools also typically set their own rules for the output, as set out in this look at the terms of popular AI generators. Consent and the limits CD Projekt set Szwed told Game File the treatment was tied to this situation. “As a person working with voice actors over all the regions in the world, this is a big concern,” he said, adding that “this was a special case” caused by Rozenek’s health problems. The studio is not planning to do anything similar with the voice of Doug Cockle, who plays Geralt in the English releases, Szwed said. He added that Rozenek’s voice would not be altered in a hypothetical future Witcher game set later in the timeline, because the vocal change would be explainable there. “It’s more about this specific situation here, where we have both the voice from 12 years ago and from now next to each other,” he said. Szwed also said he considers the arrangement defensible: “I do think this is one of those ways where you can use AI ethically, with consent and also to do something good.” It is CD Projekt’s second project with Respeecher. The company was previously used for Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty expansion, after Miłogost Reczek, the Polish actor for Viktor Vektor, died in 2021. Reczek, who also voiced Vesemir in the Polish release of The Witcher 3, was not recast, and his family gave consent for the AI work. CD Projekt has separately confirmed that it is developing a fourth mainline Witcher game, set for release in 2028.