The Week in Voice: Two Goodbyes, Five Welsh Wins and a Cloned Batman

Two goodbyes, a trophy cabinet full of Welsh accents, and an AI company that asked Batman to prove he’s Batman. Here’s your week in voice, in about four minutes.

Hello again. It’s Friday, the kettle’s on, and it’s been one of those weeks where the news couldn’t decide whether to make us cry or laugh. So we did a bit of both.

Two voices we lost

We’ll start with the hard part. Jiří Štěpnička died in Prague on Sunday at 79. For decades, when Harrison Ford spoke in a Czech cinema, it was Štěpnička you heard. In March he’d said the role had been taken from him, and that’s a hard thing to read now.

In Indonesia, Toto Warsito, the Indonesian voice of Muzan in Demon Slayer, has died. He started out dubbing telenovelas in 1993. The news reached most fans through a dubbing school’s Instagram post, which feels about right for a man who spent his life making other people’s stories sound like home. Our thoughts are with both families.

A good week to be Welsh

Now for the cheerful bit. Welsh voice actors won five of the fourteen VOX Awards, and Phil Rowe took three of them home on his own. Nikki Mills won best audiobook with the first audiobook she’d ever recorded, which is either inspiring or deeply annoying, depending on how many you’ve done. In Johannesburg, 5FM’s Brionne Olsen won for radio and dedicated it to his late mother. Congratulations to every one of them.

AI had a busy week

It did, and not much of it was good news. In the Philippines, Lindy Pellicer lost a big brand job to AI after 40 years of voicing ads. Her son’s guess was that it was “a budget thing”, which is the kindest way anyone’s ever described it.

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In Spain, Claudio Serrano, the Spanish voice of Batman since 2005, found a cloned version of himself on a US platform. When he complained, he says, it asked for a recording of his voice to prove who he was. You honestly couldn’t write it.

There was some pushback, too. Japan’s actors’ union published its first rules for AI and voices, with Goku’s voice, Masako Nozawa, saying unauthorised use leaves her “disillusioned”. And Mexico’s lower house voted to make platforms pull AI-altered voices or pay. Critics have nicknamed it the Anti-Meme Law, so expect the memes about it any minute now.

Money, castings and who pays for them

Voice123 will start charging clients to post castings from 1 November, once they pass a small monthly allowance. If you pay that site for auditions, watch your invitations closely over the next two months. Meanwhile Audible says it wants every book as an audiobook in every language. Its own survey found half of listeners would try an AI narrator, and nearly two thirds follow a narrator they like. Narrators, take the second number to your next negotiation.

And to finish on a smile

Gromit is getting a voice after 37 years of silence. Martin Freeman is reading the dog’s autobiography, and Nick Park has already told everyone it isn’t a “voice” as such. Thirty seven years without a word, and the first thing he does is write a memoir. Relatable.

Over in games, Charlie Cox has recorded 40 hours for a Sega game that doesn’t have a name yet. “It’s a whole different job, man,” he said. Every voice actor who’s done a ten-hour game session just nodded.

That’s the week. Look after your voices, drink some water, and we’ll see you next Friday.

Sources: Voice Over Herald reporting this week, linked above.

Lee este artículo en español: La semana en la voz: dos despedidas, cinco triunfos galeses y un Batman clonado

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