Color me unsurprised. The VA business has only gotten more competitive as time has progressed - the majority of VA work is surprisingly just close to the natural sounding voice of the VA themselves. (Rarely is a cartoonish or outlandish voice required).
TTS systems like ElevenLabs, etc. are going to heavily disrupt the industry in the next few years particularly with voice-to-voice mapping, e.g. regular John Doe quickly records the line in an angry voice, "THESE PRETZELS ARE MAKING ME THIRSTY!", then maps the emotion/inflection onto the desired TTS voice model.
VA licensing will also become a thing but plenty of major studios that would require hundreds of voices for video games and other things don't have to license known voices at all, they can just create generate brand new ones and pay zero licensing fees.
Comments
Color me unsurprised. The VA business has only gotten more competitive as time has progressed - the majority of VA work is surprisingly just close to the natural sounding voice of the VA themselves. (Rarely is a cartoonish or outlandish voice required).
TTS systems like ElevenLabs, etc. are going to heavily disrupt the industry in the next few years particularly with voice-to-voice mapping, e.g. regular John Doe quickly records the line in an angry voice, "THESE PRETZELS ARE MAKING ME THIRSTY!", then maps the emotion/inflection onto the desired TTS voice model.
VA licensing will also become a thing but plenty of major studios that would require hundreds of voices for video games and other things don't have to license known voices at all, they can just create generate brand new ones and pay zero licensing fees.