Interview with Shreyas Nivas (CEO of Replica Studios')
/By Justin D Williams
We had a chat with Shreyas Nivas CEO of Replica Studios about new features for their A.I. Voice Dialogue. Replica Studios was formed by a group of deep learning engineers, designers, and software developers headquartered in the U.S and Australia, Replica Studios has set out to empower creative people globally with its voice AI platform. In 2019, the company launched an AI platform to empower the next generation of creators to produce highly immersive games, movies, and entertainment. Replica’s growing AI voice library enables creative talent and voice actors to license and scale their synthetic voice for use in games, streaming content, advertising, films, and much more. For more information, visit www.replicastudios.com.
Otakus & Geeks: Can you tell us a little about Project and Scenes and how the whole concept of A.I. Voice Dialogue came about?
For the last few years, we have been working on creating unique AI voices designed for games and films. While Google or Amazon have their corporate-sounding AI voices, we wanted to provide creators the ability to give their characters a voice with personality and emotion. We believe that AI voice actors are going to continue to play an important role when developing games.
We've been focusing on creating a library of AI voice actors and the tools needed to direct their performances. Projects and Scenes is the latest update that gives creators the ability to work on scenes with multiple characters. This means a full script can be worked on and exported into a project, either in Unreal Engine, Unity, iClone, or as audio files.
Otakus & Geeks: We’ve seen a demo on Youtube of recent updates for this particular project. Can you go in-depth on the recent updates and what it means for the project?
Our latest update of Replica Studios is called Projects and Scenes. Essentially, it gives users the ability to organize their projects and create multiple scenes. It's not super sexy, but we've been able to improve the workflow based on the feedback from our early users.
You also have the ability to create your own characters and cast an AI voice that suits. We'll be continuing to work on improving our desktop app to fit into the creative workflow of our users.
Otakus & Geeks: How do you think the A.I. Voice feature is helpful to indie and Triple A developers?
Currently, because the industry is still new, AAA studios are finding the voices are not high enough quality to use in production. However, they are saving thousands of dollars and hours of time using the AI voices in pre-production. It's quick and easy to add a placeholder script to test the flow of a game before bringing in human voice actors for final production.
For indie devs who would never be able to afford human voice actors, AI voice provides a way to add dialogue to their games. We have hundreds of indie creators sharing their videos or games on our Discord. It's really cool to see what's possible now.
Looking into the future, eventually the characters in games will be driven by AI. It'll be impossible to pre-record every possible voice line, so AI voice will be the only answer.
Otakus & Geeks: One of the things we really like from what we saw from the interface is how easy it was to navigate and input commands. What were some of the challenges of making this program accessible for beginners and veterans alike?
Thanks, keeping it simple is something we have focused on. Though there's still lots we want to improve!
One of the biggest challenges is educating users that the AI will not always pronounce words correctly or as expected. In these instances simply spelling those words phonetically or the way you would like it to sound should work. Some trial-and-error, back and forth may be required but our team is constantly working on improvements to make the experience better.
Otakus & Geeks: Why was the integration of the Unreal Engine very important to Replica Studios and what were some of the challenges of using Unreal for this project?
Much like how we try to make our user interface as easy and simple as possible, we want to make the adoption of our tools in existing workflows just as simple. Unreal Engine has been one of the leading game development platforms of the last 10 years and firmly cemented its place in people's toolchains for indie and AAA titles alike. Making our tools easily available to these developers was something we wanted to focus on early on.
In bringing our tools together all of the challenges were around finding a practical workflow between the two tools, using Replica to direct the voices, and then Unreal to manage the assets. We initially attempted to bring more of Replicas interface into Unreal but found we were able to create a richer experience when directing the voices in an application that was created. We also still have some big ideas around how better we can fit into some of the workflows within Unreal Engine that we simply haven't had the capacity to bring to our users yet, but we hope to bring some of those enhancements over the next 12 months so stay tuned.
Otakus & Geeks: Will there be other game engines that you’re looking at in the future for Projects and Scenes?
Well, the answer to this is all of them. We can confidently say that if the program, app, or game engine you wish to use allows the ability to import audio files, then Replica Studios is already 100% compatible and ready to go. As we allow users to export as FLAC, MP3, OGG, or WAV files. That said, we are always looking at new plugins for future platforms to make this process even easier.
Otakus & Geeks: Final question, what can we expect next from Replica Studios?
Hundreds of new voices! We're growing our voice team to help work with voice actors to create new and interesting voices. Our goal is to have the biggest and best library of AI voices available.
We are really excited to see what our community, indie developers, AAA studios and content creators work on next as they share with us what is possible under the #MadeWithReplica tag.
