CD Projekt uses AI to restore Geralt's pre-stroke Polish voice for new Witcher 3 expansion, with the actor's consent

CD Projekt Red will use AI to adjust Geralt's Polish voice in Songs of the Past, the Witcher 3 expansion due in 2027. Jacek Rozenek, who has voiced Geralt in Polish since the first game, suffered a stroke in 2019 that left his voice lower and gruffer, so he is recording the new lines himself and Ukrainian voice AI firm Respeecher is matching them to how he sounded in 2014.

According to Game File and Kotaku on Nov 11, Rozenek could not speak for months after the stroke and trained his voice six to seven hours a day to return to acting. The base game still carries the roughly 10,000 lines he recorded in 2014, and the studio worried new lines would clash with the old ones scene to scene. "As a person working with voice actors over all the regions in the world, this is a big concern," localization producer Mikołaj Szwed said, but "this is one of those ways where you can use AI ethically, with consent and also to do something good." Rozenek said the point is for the voice to be "as close as possible to my voice from 12 years ago" and that he has "great trust" in the developers. Respeecher's Dmytro Vasylets said the work took "dozens of hours" and that AI artifacts "never fully disappear." The two companies previously recreated a late voice actor's performance, with his estate's consent, for Cyberpunk 2077's expansion.

The studio called it "a special case" and said it does not plan to keep altering Rozenek's voice. The X post that broke the news passed 260,000 views in three hours. Replies noted that voice actors' main fight has been over cloning without consent, the opposite of this case, and a widely liked reply stressed that Rozenek still records every new line himself.