Jo Rideout and Diana Gardner introduced themselves at 4:24 as the voices of Shani and Celeste, then Bence Pajor moved the conversation to the part of Embark Studios Arc Raiders AI voice work most players never hear. At 7:31, he explained why the ping system leans on generated voices built from cast recordings instead of a full set of individually tracked lines.
Pajor said, “To record the training data for the ping system becomes too impractical to record every possible version of something.” He added, “I mean the actors would just go crazy if they had to read all of that.” That is the production problem behind the system: the studio would have to keep capturing tiny variations as features changed, and the number of short lines would multiply fast.
Pajor at 7:31
“That’s not feasible because the game has been changing so fast and we can’t call them in every time we just change a feature,” Pajor said. The line points to a workflow that can stall when a game is still moving under its own feet; each tweak can ripple into new or altered voice needs, and repeated sessions become a scheduling burden rather than a one-off recording day.
Stefan Strandberg pushed back on the idea that Embark Studios is trying to sideline performers. “We are not in the industry of replacing actors, actually quite the opposite we should celebrate the performance and give them more space,” he said. That matters because the studio is describing a tool built from performances, not a replacement for them, and the ping system is being presented as a way to preserve speed without forcing the cast into endless rereads.
Shani and Celeste at 4:24
The 4:24 introduction from Rideout and Gardner gives the explanation a face rather than a systems memo. Their roles as Shani and Celeste show the cast is still central to the game’s voice identity, even as Embark Studios leans on generated output for the highest-volume utility lines.
The unanswered issue is scale: how many ping lines or variations the system would have required is not stated. For now, the practical takeaway is simple — Embark Studios is using generated voices to keep ARC Raiders moving while the game keeps changing, and the studio is drawing a clear line between that workflow and any claim that it wants to swap actors out of the process.
