AI voice acting for visual novels and Ren’Py games
A fully voiced visual novel can have thousands of lines, and every rewrite of a scene means new recordings. AI voice acting turns each line into a file in seconds and keeps every character’s voice the same from the first chapter to the last.
SuperClonica has anime, conversational and character voices for Supertonic 3, a free online test and a free engine that writes OGG files straight into your game folder. This guide shows how to cast a visual novel, how to prepare lines and how to wire the files into Ren’Py.
Cast your characters
Give each character one voice for the whole game, and keep a sheet with the voice, the speed and the seed you used.
- Heroines: Anime Heroine for wide, lively emotion, Senpaika and Miyuki Takara for gentler roles, Rei Ayanami for a quiet, restrained character.
- Heroes and rivals: Light Yagami and Levi Ackerman, low and restrained; Naruto Uzumaki, highish and lively.
- Everyday cast: Sofia, Alice, Artyom and Teenager for classmates, friends and family.
- For psychological horror: Mita, a cute, calm voice that lets the text add the creepiness.
- Free: Maya, Ciri and Dark Willow.
Audition a voice free online
On the page of any voice, paste a line of 30 to 100 characters, choose the language and press Voice it. In a few seconds you hear whether the voice fits the character and can download the recording. No account is needed.
Prepare lines for voicing
Keep a table of line number, character and text: it drives both the voicing script and the game script.
- One audio file per line, named by chapter and line number, such as ch1_014.
- Remove text tags and formatting from the text you voice.
- Write interjections the way they are said: a sigh, a laugh, a gasp in letters.
- In Japanese, write names and words with unusual readings in kana.
Into Ren’Py
Install the free SuperClonica engine: python -m pip install superclonica-cpu. Voice a line straight into the game folder; the extension .ogg gives an Ogg Vorbis file: superclonica --text "You came back... I knew you would." --voice heroine.json --lang en --output game/voice/ch1_014.ogg. In the Ren’Py script, put voice "voice/ch1_014.ogg" on the line before the dialogue line it belongs to. A small script can loop over your table and voice every line; the engine runs offline on an ordinary processor, with no character limit.
Voices you can ship
Fan-made character voices are for fan games only. For a game you sell, use voices you have the rights to: train each character’s voice in the studio from a clean recording of a voice actor who agreed, or order it on the exchange. Training runs on your own computer with an NVIDIA graphics card and is free.