CD Projekt Red has used AI to adjust Geralt’s Polish voice in The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past, the new expansion for its 2015 role-playing game. The reason is the actor’s health: Jacek Rozenek had a stroke in 2019, and his voice now sounds different from the one players know.
Rozenek recorded all of his new lines himself and agreed to the process, according to the studio. The recordings were then sent to the AI company Respeecher, which reshaped them to match how he sounded in the original game, so old and new dialogue do not jar when they play back to back.
The detail comes from an interview Game File ran with Rozenek and with CDPR localisation producer Mikołaj Szwed. When CDPR had Rozenek into its studio roughly twelve months ago, Szwed heard a voice that had dropped in pitch and turned rougher. The studio worried about the seam: Songs of the Past brings extra grunts, shouts and short quips that sit inside the old map, next to the roughly 10,000 lines Rozenek recorded in 2014.
Szwed said CDPR gave Respeecher all the Witcher 3 lines Rozenek had recorded, from which the company built a model of his voice. In his words: “They created an algorithm of his voice, based on his lines.”
Rozenek described how hard the recovery has been. After the stroke he could not speak for months, and when he briefly came back as Geralt for a quest in the 2022 next-gen update, he said, “I was so exhausted after this recording.” Getting his voice working again meant daily training sessions of six or seven hours. On the AI work he said: “The point is that this voice should be as close as possible to my voice from 12 years ago.”
Rozenek has voiced Geralt in Polish since the series began, including the 2015 and 2016 expansions Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine. Songs of the Past is set around the same time as the base game, which is why the older recordings have to sit beside the new ones. CDPR has also confirmed a fourth mainline Witcher game, set for 2028.
Szwed accepted that AI in games is contested, but argued this case is different: “I do think this is one of those ways where you can use AI ethically, with consent and also to do something good.” He stressed that the studio considered it only because of Rozenek’s health.
CDPR announced the expansion on 27 May with Fool’s Theory as co-developer; it is slated for 2027 on PC and on Sony’s and Microsoft’s current consoles. No exact release date has been given.
