One of the first impressions people get when starting The Day Before is the voice acting sounds a lot like it’s AI and not real people. I’ve heard it and dug through the internet, and this is what I’ve found in terms of The Day Before voice acting being AI.
Is the voice acting in The Day Before AI?
After digging around the internet, I can’t find a single piece of evidence that proves The Day Before voice acting is or isn’t AI. That said, the lack of evidence that there are real, human voice actors working on The Day Before is in and of itself proof that it may be AI.
First, I checked FNTASTIC’s web page, which is strangely desolate. There’s not much there besides some general information about their games. Next, I combed IMBD to see if there were voice actors credited for working on The Day Before. There’s a short film made in 2017 but no mention of the game there.
I went through Twitter to see if any The Day Before actors tweeted saying how excited they were that the game was out. No luck. There’s no mention of human voice actors anywhere, which is sus.
I listened to the NPCs in The Day Before via a streamer named Player 2. To me, the NPCs sounded exactly like the NPCs in vanilla Skyrim which was released in 2011. If you know, you know, but if you don’t, the NPCs in Skyrim sounded very robotic and inhuman. They often use very strange language like “breathing organs” which is either poor writing or AI improvisation, it’s hard to say.
In defense of The Day Before voice acting maybe not being AI, the writing could be weird in English because FNTASTIC is a company based in Singapore. The translation to English may be weird, but then there’s the thing about volunteers.
On the “About Us” section of the FNTASTIC web page, the company reveals that there are almost double the amount of volunteers, some paid and some unpaid, working at FNTASTIC. There could be some lowly volunteer that did a lot of voice work for The Day Before NPCs but we aren’t aware of them. All of this paired with all the other weird things surrounding FNTASTIC as a company including a trademark lawsuit and multiple dropped indie games leads me to not be surprised if the voice acting is AI in The Day Before.
So the results are inconclusive. There’s no hard evidence that the voice acting in The Day Before is AI but there’s nothing yet proving that it isn’t. All in all, it’s a weird game, and truthfully, I’m leaning toward The Day Before’s voice acting being AI theory.
