Japanese talent agency partners with AI company, won’t dub English anime

Japanese voice actors may soon be able to dub in English with the help of AI.

According to Oricon News, Aoni Productions has partnered with CoeFont to begin creating a digital portfolio of their talents’ voices. For now, these voices are expressly intended for novelties like digital assistants and expressly won’t be used for creative acting endeavors.

Aoni Productions represents some of the largest talents in the anime industry, including Masako Nozawa who voices Goku in the Dragon Ball franchise.

CoeFont’s AI voice technology will be used to translate the appealing voice data of voice actors belonging to Aoni Production into multiple languages, including English and Chinese. The company will provide and propose high-quality multilingual AI voices primarily for voice assistants (ex. Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant), robots and products equipped with voice navigation (ex. Pepper, medical devices), etc…

Both companies emphasize that they will not provide services related to the “acting” field, such as animation and dubbing of foreign language films. They will create multilingual AI voices excluding the “acting” field…

Translation: Google

Conversely, some fans have welcomed the growing potential of AI to cut out western localizers and voice actors; while their defenders maintain that the use of AI undermines the work’s integrity.