TL;DR I'm well aware of the Courtenay Taylor situation and also Nexus's statement regarding mods using AI voice. My intention was to make FO4 a better experience for everyone but I will certainly remove the mod if Ashly Burch or Bethesda has a problem with it.
Regarding the argument against using someone’s voice likeness without their consent
Fallout 4 is a game that uses voiced NPCs and a voiced protagonist. This means any mod maker who has ever created a new quest, a new NPC, or a custom companion that involved additional conversations by either the Player or by other vanilla NPCs, had to come across the method of recycling and editing already existing vanilla dialogue lines by the original voice actors, so their mod wouldn’t end up with muted conversations. This way of manually editing existing voice assets was there from the very beginning of modding Bethesda games, and has never resulted in any controversies whatsoever - on the contrary, creating recycled voice content this way is regarded as a clever workaround and is a widely accepted method by the community and Bethesda. But I think we can all agree that the method of cutting and editing vanilla voice lines the old fashion way doesn’t guarantee that the end result is something the original VA or Bethesda would necessarily agree with. On the other hand, legally speaking, an AI voice model that was trained using only the Fallout 4 vanilla voice lines of a certain in-game character is just another tool like that - namely to recycle the same assets just like the previously mentioned manual audio engineering, only on a much more advanced technical scale, most likely leading to a much more convincing end result. AI voice generation is a hot topic at this moment in time, but just as manual voice editing, it is merely a tool that can be used for good or bad. It can be a magic wand to simply restore cut content in the original spirit of a character regarding their motivation, persona or backstory, to seamlessly integrate a missing section of the game and make Fallout 4 a better experience overall. And of course it can also be a tool, just as manual voice editing, that can be used to create very convincing sounding content that the original creators wouldn’t like. My point is, I don’t think it’s a question of the tools being used - either both are okay or none of them - and it’s more a question of what content is made with those tools.
Needless to say, if it turns out either Bethesda or the original voice talents involved didn't like my content, I would immediately remove it from any platform I published it on.
Regarding the argument of supporting voice artists instead of using AI
I will always prefer hiring voice actors to using AI voice generation. As a matter of fact this mod has its predecessor available publicly which was created using the help of a voice actor. Also note that I did contact Ashly Burch way back in 2016 when I first started working on my original Dependency Quest Fix. It’s not a big surprise that she didn’t get back to me, she is one of the top VAs in the industry after all. But more importantly, someone opened my eyes and told me that a VA who once had a contractual agreement to perform the voice of a character in a AAA title, would never be able to voice additional lines for that same character again while working for a third party developer. This is simply because these contracts almost always cover these types of situations, so the voice actor could only work for the original production company again on the same character, usually in case of future DLCs or any kind of upcoming official content. So no matter how hard I try, that scenario where a mod creator hires Ashly Burch to reprise her role as Tina, Cricket or Rowdy from Fallout 4, simply does not exist.
This is why I went for the next best thing and created AI dialogue for her in my own game so I can have the character as a unique vendor with her original voice. And why wouldn’t I share this creation with the community as long as nobody has a problem with it. And keep in mind that in the future I will always support VAs instead of AI if there’s a way to do that.
This doesn't work at all for me, the junky motherf****er just keep saying the same and the persuasion failed, EASY SOLUTION TYPE THIS WITHOUT THE quotation marks ON THE CONSOLE AND BOOM MAGIC. "SetStage 00033527 400"
using the vanilla voice files in comparison to using the voice files using a tool are no diffrent in the nature of what they offer, one is the original voice actress and the other is similar sounding but effectively diffrent, which makes it not at all the same voice, but they do sound similar.
both use the NPC's voice but only one is considered unique but similar sounding to the vanilla counter part, but it's not the same voice at that point and you can tell the difference when listening to the sample, unless your ears are broken lol, well in that case i get your position and reasoning.
Unfortunately with this mod I have to first ask Tina to stand at the trading counter every time before I can start trading with her The quest is fixed, no more need to teleport her, disabled the mod after I finished the quest and traded with her a couple of times and everything is fine, may be incompatible with Extended Dialogue Interface
Honestly, if you couldn't get Ms. Burch's permission or cooperation, the project should have died right then and there. Just because you CAN doesn't mean you SHOULD.
i love the idea of this mod, but i'm more into mods that offer quest followers like the UCC mod does, that mod author did the same thing effectively using eleven labs and tts to achieve the same results, but he made it so they are followers and not just a merchant, i still love the prospects of this idea, because it opens up so many possible doors of what we could do to the story of the game on so many levels, so if someone wanted to they could dramatically change the story in a lore friendly way using existing character's of the base game dialogues.
that is an revolutionary concept never before heard of in the video game world, it's so much of a valued asset that i want to see more of in these games.
i mean back when i was playing skyrim i remember when people were first experimenting with the idea of voicing the player's voice and that made it amazing because suddenly we had all of these options in how to play the game that made it so great and playing fo4 with it's voiced protagonist i love that people are at least willing to splice in voiced or reuse content from the game to add in dialogue for the player voice and to use something like eleven labs to extend that idea ever further is something very much desired after and i want to see so much more of this potential unlocked for future mods and even games.
in my opinion it's no diffrent from using another text to speech program, like take for example VAsynth mod, that mod uses the same protocol, but eleven labs just sounds a hell of a whole lot better, but one is considered ok to use and the other is not simply because it sounds more realistic, kind of a silly standard to be honest.
Will you consider adding Bobby De Luca as a recruitable settler? Tina's story based on the game dialogues is her wanting to get out of vault 81 together with her brother. It'd be nice to be able to recruit Bobby as well and reunite the twins.
125 comments
TL;DR
I'm well aware of the Courtenay Taylor situation and also Nexus's statement regarding mods using AI voice.
My intention was to make FO4 a better experience for everyone but I will certainly remove the mod if Ashly Burch or Bethesda has a problem with it.
Regarding the argument against using someone’s voice likeness without their consent
Fallout 4 is a game that uses voiced NPCs and a voiced protagonist. This means any mod maker who has ever created a new quest, a new NPC, or a custom companion that involved additional conversations by either the Player or by other vanilla NPCs, had to come across the method of recycling and editing already existing vanilla dialogue lines by the original voice actors, so their mod wouldn’t end up with muted conversations. This way of manually editing existing voice assets was there from the very beginning of modding Bethesda games, and has never resulted in any controversies whatsoever - on the contrary, creating recycled voice content this way is regarded as a clever workaround and is a widely accepted method by the community and Bethesda. But I think we can all agree that the method of cutting and editing vanilla voice lines the old fashion way doesn’t guarantee that the end result is something the original VA or Bethesda would necessarily agree with.
On the other hand, legally speaking, an AI voice model that was trained using only the Fallout 4 vanilla voice lines of a certain in-game character is just another tool like that - namely to recycle the same assets just like the previously mentioned manual audio engineering, only on a much more advanced technical scale, most likely leading to a much more convincing end result. AI voice generation is a hot topic at this moment in time, but just as manual voice editing, it is merely a tool that can be used for good or bad. It can be a magic wand to simply restore cut content in the original spirit of a character regarding their motivation, persona or backstory, to seamlessly integrate a missing section of the game and make Fallout 4 a better experience overall. And of course it can also be a tool, just as manual voice editing, that can be used to create very convincing sounding content that the original creators wouldn’t like.
My point is, I don’t think it’s a question of the tools being used - either both are okay or none of them - and it’s more a question of what content is made with those tools.
Needless to say, if it turns out either Bethesda or the original voice talents involved didn't like my content, I would immediately remove it from any platform I published it on.
Regarding the argument of supporting voice artists instead of using AI
I will always prefer hiring voice actors to using AI voice generation. As a matter of fact this mod has its predecessor available publicly which was created using the help of a voice actor.
Also note that I did contact Ashly Burch way back in 2016 when I first started working on my original Dependency Quest Fix. It’s not a big surprise that she didn’t get back to me, she is one of the top VAs in the industry after all. But more importantly, someone opened my eyes and told me that a VA who once had a contractual agreement to perform the voice of a character in a AAA title, would never be able to voice additional lines for that same character again while working for a third party developer. This is simply because these contracts almost always cover these types of situations, so the voice actor could only work for the original production company again on the same character, usually in case of future DLCs or any kind of upcoming official content.
So no matter how hard I try, that scenario where a mod creator hires Ashly Burch to reprise her role as Tina, Cricket or Rowdy from Fallout 4, simply does not exist.
This is why I went for the next best thing and created AI dialogue for her in my own game so I can have the character as a unique vendor with her original voice. And why wouldn’t I share this creation with the community as long as nobody has a problem with it. And keep in mind that in the future I will always support VAs instead of AI if there’s a way to do that.
"SetStage 00033527 400"
using the vanilla voice files in comparison to using the voice files using a tool are no diffrent in the nature of what they offer, one is the original voice actress and the other is similar sounding but effectively diffrent, which makes it not at all the same voice, but they do sound similar.
both use the NPC's voice but only one is considered unique but similar sounding to the vanilla counter part, but it's not the same voice at that point and you can tell the difference when listening to the sample, unless your ears are broken lol, well in that case i get your position and reasoning.
The quest is fixed, no more need to teleport her, disabled the mod after I finished the quest and traded with her a couple of times and everything is fine, may be incompatible with Extended Dialogue Interface
that is an revolutionary concept never before heard of in the video game world, it's so much of a valued asset that i want to see more of in these games.
i mean back when i was playing skyrim i remember when people were first experimenting with the idea of voicing the player's voice and that made it amazing because suddenly we had all of these options in how to play the game that made it so great and playing fo4 with it's voiced protagonist i love that people are at least willing to splice in voiced or reuse content from the game to add in dialogue for the player voice and to use something like eleven labs to extend that idea ever further is something very much desired after and i want to see so much more of this potential unlocked for future mods and even games.
in my opinion it's no diffrent from using another text to speech program, like take for example VAsynth mod, that mod uses the same protocol, but eleven labs just sounds a hell of a whole lot better, but one is considered ok to use and the other is not simply because it sounds more realistic, kind of a silly standard to be honest.
Considering how the other mod (Recruit Tina De Luca - Bobby De Luca - Holt Combes) is incompatible, I really hope you'll consider making a mod for Bobby.
Thank you for this great mod!