At the ripe old age of 91, James Earl Jones has decided it’s time to retire and hand the job of voicing Darth Vader to AI technology to head off the possibility that Disney may replace him, as if that were possible.
Ukrainian speech synthesis start-up Respeecher has already worked for Disney on the Star Wars franchise. They use a mixture of archive recordings and proprietary machine learning algorithms to create new dialogue. They first worked with Lucasfilm to create the voice of young Luke Skywalker for Disney+’s The Book of Boba Fett. More recently, their job was ti de-age Jones’ voice by 45 years for the Obi-Wan Kenobi series. The Lviv-based company’s job was made more difficult than normal by Russia’s untimely invasion.
In a Kyiv theatre, Respeecher CTO and co-founder Dmytro Bielievtsov (above, left) and a team of developers trained the machine learning model and pieced together it’s outputs behind a wall of tables, books and anything else they could find to protect themselves from blasts and stacked them in front of windows. Others found refuge in basements and the interior corridors of apartment blocks.
Meanwhile, Skywalker Sound supervising editor Matthew Wood was on the horns of a dilemma. Respeecher had been hired because their system’s vocal performances possessed a rare human touch, but he was far more concerned for their well-being than he was about their ability to deliver. “There are always alternatives that we could pursue that wouldn’t be as good as what they would give us. We never wanted to put them in any kind of additional danger to stay in the office to do something”. He need not have worried. Even under the most trying of conditions, the Respeecher team were determined to complete their part of the project. Their attitude was, “Let’s work, let’s work in the face of this adversity, let’s persevere”.
Respeecher CEO Alex Serdiuk (above, centre) is rightly immensely proud of their contribution. “We create places to work for people, we create jobs, we pay them money, we contribute to the Ukrainian economy, and that’s quite meaningful. But also, hopefully more people will hear about Ukraine—about our tech community, about our start-ups—because of it”. They continue to work on other (secret) projects despite the challenges.
Source: Vanity Fair
Image: Cinematographe