Darth Vader’s original voice will be AI-generated from now on

James Earl Jones, 91, has provided the voice of the iconic Star Wars villain for 45 years, starting with Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope in 1977 and concluding with a brief line of dialogue in Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker of 2019.

During the creation of the Obi-Wan Kenobi television series, Jones gave permission one Disney will replicate his Darth Vader vocal performance in future projects using an AI voice modeling tool.

“I mentioned that I was studying the possibility of ending this particular character”said Matthew Wood, supervising sound editor at Lucasfilm, during an interview with Vanity Fair. “So how are we going to do this?”

The answer was respecta voice cloning product from a Ukrainian company that uses deep learning to model and replicate human voices in a way almost indistinguishable from the real thing.

 

Previously, Lucasfilm had used Respeecher to clone Mark Hamill’s voice to the Mandalorian, and the company thought the same technology would be ideal for a big Darth Vader appearance that would require dozens of lines of dialogue. From Jones’ archive recordings, Respeecher created a voice model that could be “performed” by another actor using the company’s speech conversion technology.

Leaving Vader aside, Respeecher knows that this type of technology can pose significant security, social engineering, and even copyright issues whether one can imitate another person’s voice from recorded samples.

The company’s ethics statement states that the company “does not allow any deceptive use of our technology” s “does not use voices without permission when doing so may affect the subject’s privacy or ability to earn a living.”

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