AI to turn ‘Dragon Ball,’ ‘Gundam’ voices into English, Chinese

Aoni Production, the talent agency that manages big-name anime voice actors such as those from “Dragon Ball,” is partnering with a Tokyo artificial intelligence startup to replicate the voices of performers into multilingual speech, the company announced this month.

Masako Nozawa, who voices Dragon Ball’s main character Son Goku, will be part of the collaboration with CoeFont. She will join other famous voice actors, including Banjo Ginga of the “Gundam” series.

Within the anime industry, artificial intelligence has been utilized in the media creation process in various — and occasionally controversial — ways. Masako Nozawa, who voices Goku in the Japanese-language dub of Dragon Ball, is teaming up with a major A.I. company for a novel new initiative: to create non-Japanese language dubs for products and services outside the acting field.

As detailed on Oricon, Nozawa’s management agency Aoni Production has officially partnered with CoeFont Co Ltd, a company that specializes in A.I. voice technology. Consequently, 10 of Aoni’s voice actors, including Nozawa and Food Wars anime star Banjo Ginga, will permit CoeFont to use their original voice data to be converted via A.I. tech into several different languages, including English and Chinese. CoeFont plans to utilize this A.I. language tech for voice assistant products such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant, as well as for other voice navigation-equipped products such as medical devices.