Embark Studios' CEO Patrick Söderlund admitted that there is a quality difference when it comes to using voice actors versus AI. In an unexpected twist, humans have taken some jobs back from AI. Embark Studios' CEO Patrick Söderlund recently told that the studio re-recorded some of the AI-generated voice lines in with human voices, only after its successful launch in October. There is a quality difference, Söderlund told A real professional actor is better than AI; that's just how it is. With Arc Raiders' player count peaking at nearly half a million users on Steam, the game's breakout success was still marred by its use of text-to-speech AI. While there was no generative AI used for the visuals of the extraction shooter, Embark Studios paid its actors for approval to license their voices for text-to-speech AI, according to Söderlund.

Speechly, a startup out of Helsinki that boasts an experienced team of speech recognition and "natural language understanding" experts, has raised €2 million in seed funding to make it easier for developers to add a voice UI to their products. The round is led by Berlin's Cherry Ventures, with participation from Seedcamp, Quantum Angels, Joyance Partners, Social Starts, Tiny.vc, Juha Paananen (co-founder of Nonstop Games, which exited to King), and Nicolas Dessaigne (founder of Algolia). The funding will be used by Speechly to further develop and open up its API to enable non-experts to create voice-enabled applications. "Voice has shown real promise over the past few years but a real breakthrough beyond setting kitchen timers and playing Spotify is yet to be seen," Speechly co-founder and CEO Otto Söderlund tells TechCrunch. "The current fundamental problem of voice assistant platforms is that they tend to fail with more complex user requests and needs".

In 2017, there were 7,672 games released on Steam, the world's most popular video game service. As of January 2018, if you filter out the dross, the average Steam game sells about 1,000 copies, according to independent data-crunching by publisher No More Robots. This is the dispiriting reality that independent game developers are working with: at this month's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, there were queues up and down the hallway for a talk entitled "Making indie games that sell". Patrick Söderlund is the executive vice-president of one of the biggest game publishers in the world, EA – a company far removed from these problems, making multimillion-dollar games with studios that employ hundreds of people. Twenty years ago, though, he was part of a three-person team working out of an apartment in Sweden, making the original Battlefield games that have since become one of EA's largest money-makers.