THE CRUNCH
CD Projekt Red has confirmed that Geralt's Polish voice in the upcoming Witcher 3 expansion, Songs of the Past, is being processed by an AI voice model, with the actor's full consent. Jacek Rozenek, who has voiced the witcher in Polish since the first game, still records every line himself. The model, built by Ukrainian firm Respeecher from his original Witcher 3 recordings, then reshapes those new takes to match how he sounded in 2015.
The reason is health rather than convenience. Rozenek had a stroke in 2019 that left him unable to speak for months, and although he returned to voice acting in 2022, his voice is now lower and gruffer than the roughly 10,000 lines he recorded for the base game in 2014. Since new battle cries and one-liners can play in older parts of the map, CDPR worried the mismatch would stand out. "The point is that this voice should be as close as possible to my voice from 12 years ago," Rozenek said.
Localization producer Mikołaj Szwed called it a "special case" tied directly to Rozenek's health, and stressed that CDPR's contracts require consent for any AI work. "I do think this is one of those ways where you can use AI ethically, with consent and also to do something good," he said. Doug Cockle's English Geralt, apparently, needed no such treatment.
It is not the studio's first use of the technique. Respeecher also recreated the voice of Miłogost Reczek, the Polish actor for Cyberpunk 2077's Viktor Vektor, for the Phantom Liberty expansion after his death, again with his family's consent. The practice lands amid heightened scrutiny of AI in games, with juries and awards bodies recently penalising developers over generative AI use.