Darth Vader's voice will be AI-generated from now on

During the creation of the Obi-Wan Kenobi TV series, James Earl Jones signed off on allowing Disney to replicate his vocal performance as Darth Vader in future projects using an AI voice-modeling tool called Respeecher, according to a Vanity Fair report published Friday. Jones, who is 91, has voiced the iconic Star Wars villain for 45 years, starting with Star Wars: Episode IV--A New Hope in 1977 and concluding with a brief line of dialog in 2019's The Rise of Skywalker. "He had mentioned he was looking into winding down this particular character," said Matthew Wood, a supervising sound editor at Lucasfilm, during an interview with Vanity Fair. "So how do we move forward?" The answer was Respeecher, a voice cloning product from a company in Ukraine that uses deep learning to model and replicate human voices in a way that is nearly indistinguishable from the real thing.