Respeecher, a Ukrainian company working on deep learning AI techniques to produce high-quality synthetic speech, has participated in the work on the final episode of The Mandalorian, the iconic Disney series in the Star Wars universe.
The company’s name can be found listed in the after credits of season two, episode eight.
Oleksandr Serdiuk, CEO and co-founder of Respeecher, refused to give any comments. He said that the company could not yet comment on this collaboration under the contract.
However, as AIN.UA learned, the Ukrainian team was engaged in cloning the voice for the last episode of the series. The last episode features the voice of a young Luke Skywalker, so we can assume that the Ukrainian team was engaged in the de-aging of the voice of Mark Hamill, the actor who played Luke Skywalker.
The team’s recent work includes cloning the voice of famous American soccer player and NFL coach Vince Lombardi for an NFL commercial. To re-create the voice of this celebrity, the Respeecher team analyzed many hours of existing audio footage, isolating Lombardi’s speech patterns, his voice timbre, and creating a database of it. The old recordings were then combined with recordings of the speaker with a similar accent and voice modulations to Lombardi, as reported by FX Guide.
The piece also confirms that Respeecher did the de-aging of Luke Skywalker’s voice in The Mandalorian.
AIN.UA has previously told about the Respeecher project. Its founders, Oleksandr Serdiuk and Dmytro Bielievtsov, first created the project’s prototype while participating in a hackathon organized by Grammarly. The Respeecher technology allows one person to speak with the voice of another person without using text (speech-to-speech).
The team now consists of 17 members, and according to Serdiuk, they are working on a series of new projects, including a new Voice Marketplace project.
