The Witcher 3’s 2027 DLC Uses AI to Match Geralt’s Polish Voice
Jacek Rozenek recorded all of the expansion's Polish dialogue himself, while Respeecher uses earlier recordings with his consent to match his past performance.
CD Projekt Red is using AI to bring Jacek Rozenek’s newly recorded Polish Geralt dialogue closer to his earlier voice. Rozenek recorded all of Geralt’s Polish lines for The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past, planned for 2027 and set during the events of The Witcher 3. He performs the dialogue himself, and Doug Cockle’s English-language performance will not receive the same treatment.
A stroke in 2019 temporarily left Rozenek unable to speak. After hours of daily training, he returned to voice acting in 2022. Recording lines for a new quest in the PS5 edition of The Witcher 3 left him exhausted. In Stephen Totilo’s Game File interview, Rozenek recalled, “I was so exhausted after this recording.” He also said the goal was for his voice to be as close as possible to how it sounded 12 years earlier, and expressed trust in the game’s creators.
For the expansion, CD Projekt Red supplied Respeecher with Rozenek’s earlier The Witcher 3 recordings to train its model. His unprocessed new takes sounded lower and rougher than his earlier performance, which localization producer Mikołaj Szwed described as “much lower, much gruffer.” Game File’s before-and-after comparison characterized the adjusted voice as smoother and younger.
Respeecher synthetic speech artist Dmytro Vasylets said that training the model and working through adjustments with CD Projekt Red took dozens of hours. Some AI artifacts never fully disappear, he explained, and preserving Rozenek’s emotional range, including shouts, groans, anger, fear, and laughter, was the hardest part. Rozenek said, “The point is that this voice should be as close as possible to my voice from 12 years ago.”
Szwed described the work as a special case tied to Rozenek’s health and the difference between his earlier and current recordings. CD Projekt Red does not plan similar changes for Cockle, while a later-set Witcher game could use Rozenek’s changed voice for an older Geralt. Szwed also said the studio’s contracts require consent for AI work and that every line receives human review. Respeecher’s ethics policy says voice replication requires explicit permission through a mutually signed agreement.
CD Projekt Red previously worked with Respeecher on Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, creating new Viktor Vektor lines after Polish actor Miłogost Reczek died, with his family’s consent. Respeecher’s case study describes that work, a different situation from Rozenek’s return with his approval.
Would you regard AI voice matching differently when the actor performs the lines and consents to using earlier recordings? For more on the voice work behind Geralt’s 2027 return, follow us on X, Bluesky, YouTube, Instagram, Steam, and Telegram.
