
There are few movie franchises as iconic as George Lucas’ Star Wars, and even fewer villains as infamous as Darth Vader. In the original Start Wars trilogy, Vader was portrayed in costume by David Prowse. However, the voice of Vader that struck fear into moviegoers across the galaxy was voiced by James Earl Jones. In recent Star Wars films and TV series, Jones has continued to voice Vader. In September of 2022, now 91 years old, Jones retired from the role of voicing Darth Vader.
Fortunately for Star Wars fans, Disney has no plans of slowing down when it comes to using Vader across productions. This begs the question, who will be the new voice of Vader? The answer – Respeecher.
Respeecher is a Ukrainian company that generates speech-to-speech machine learning models with the recordings of actors who will no longer play a role. In contrast to text-to-speech technologies, speech-to-speech voice conversion is able to produce more dynamic and emotion-laden output which is more effective at recreating human speech.
Respeecher was first used by Disney to play the voice of Vader in the 2022 TV series Obi-Wan Kenobi. The use of Respeecher served as a confirmation that moving forward Vader’s voice would be rendered by AI. Whether the use of AI as the voice for Vader was a success is up for debate, but you can judge for yourself in this compilation of Vader scenes from Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Interestingly, Disney did not use Jones’ current voice when using Respeecher to generate Vader’s voice – Disney used Jones’ voice from the ’70s and ’80s when the original Star Wars trilogy was produced. This opens a series of questions – What will happen when a character ages? Can the voice of a character from one project be used in an entirely different project? What recourse will actors have if their voice synthesis files leak? Until these situations arise, these questions will remain unanswered.
The use of AI in film, and the use of Respeecher and other similar technologies will be interesting to track. Disney has always been a leader and an innovator in the film industry when it comes to the use of new technologies in production, and all signs point towards Disney continuing to be a ground breaker.
Image by https://unsplash.com/@mathieustern
Authors
Expertise
Insights
-
Technology
Bluesky Rolls Out New Community Guidelines
Bluesky, a social network competitor of X, Threads and other open networks including Mastodon, is revisiting its community guidelines and other user policies to provide more clarity around user safety… -
Technology
Perplexity AI’s All-Cash Bid for Google Chrome
AI startup Perplexity AI has made an unsolicited US $34.5 billion bid to acquire Google’s Chrome browser. With over three billion users, Chrome is currently the most popular browser in the world… -
Technology
Concordia University Students Launch ‘Starsailor’ Rocket from Northern Quebec
Students from Concordia University’s Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science recently launched “Starsailor,” a rocket that a team of over 700 members developed over the past seven years… -
Technology
BC’s Mushroom-Plucking Robots Harvest Big in Latest Round of Fundraising
4AG Robotics, a British Columbia-based start-up that uses robots to harvest commercially grown mushrooms, has received a C$40 million venture capital investment to further develop its fungi-focused… -
Technology
Canada’s New Virtual Hub for Wildfire Innovation and Knowledge Exchange
With the increasing threat wildfires pose to the safety, health and economic wellbeing of Canadians and ecosystems across the country, the federal government has established the Wildfire Resilience… -
Technology
The Modernization of Estate Planning with "Trusty"
With many Canadians lacking a will, Trusty, a Toronto-based startup, aims to revolutionize estate planning by leveraging artificial intelligence (“AI”) and technology. Founder Randy Frisch created the…