Is The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past Using AI to Voice Geralt?

CD Projekt Red used AI voice technology on Geralt’s Polish lines in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Songs of the Past, and the actor who recorded those lines approved it. Jacek Rozenek has voiced Geralt in Polish since the first Witcher game. He suffered a stroke in 2019, could not speak for months, and trained his voice for six or seven hours a day to get it back.

CD Projekt Red’s localization producer Mikołaj Szwed told Game File, the newsletter that broke the story, about the studio’s concern. “It was important for us to see how much the voice of Jacek had changed, because of both the time and also because of his condition,” Szwed said. New lines for Songs of the Past include reactions and battle cries that play even inside areas from the original game, so Polish players would have heard Geralt’s voice shift mid-scene.

The fix was to train a model on Rozenek’s own 2014 recordings and use it to pull the new lines back toward his original sound. Respeecher, the AI voice company that clones voices for film, music and games, did the work, and CD Projekt Red’s localization producer described it as “a special case.”

CDPR had worked with Respeecher before. When Miłogost Reczek, the Polish voice of Viktor Vektor, died in 2021, the studio used the company to recreate his performance for the Cyberpunk 2077 expansion Phantom Liberty, with the endorsement of his family. Respeecher’s ethics page says explicit permission is required for all voice replications, secured through a mutually signed agreement.

Szwed also said the studio is not planning anything similar for the English-language Geralt, Doug Cockle. Other studios have taken public positions on AI, such as Game Science’s refusal to use it, and Valve has been cracking down on AI clones on Steam. Alliance Arts pulled a demo over cloning worries, so the argument is running in every direction at once.

Songs of the Past sends Geralt to a new region called Letten and is being co-developed with Fool’s Theory. CD Projekt Red’s own announcement puts it in 2027 on GOG, Steam, Epic Games Store, Battle.net, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2. CD Projekt Red has not said how many lines were treated this way.

The consent is what separates this from the usual voice-cloning backlash, and it is the part players should hold the studio to. For instance, the Cyberpunk 2077 job needed a family’s blessing because the original actor had died. Rozenek was alive, present in the studio and asked to be part of it. Respeecher’s published case study and its ethics page, alongside CD Projekt Red’s own expansion pages, put the consent paperwork in public: Respeecher’s ethics page. Whether CDPR applies the same standard to every language it dubs is the question worth watching now that the practice is on the record.

Correction (November 12, 2026): We originally said Rozenek called the AI decision a special case; that was CD Projekt Red's localization producer.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report