Epic Used AI to Bring James Earl Jones’ Vader Voice to ‘Fortnite’, and Players Are Already Making Him Swear

Fortnite‘s massive Star Wars seasonal event, Fortnite: Galactic Battle, is currently underway. In it, players can get skins for beloved characters like Poe Dameron, Emperor Palpatine, and Darth Jar Jar Binks and battle on land and in the sky with lightsabers and TIE fighters. One new thing that’s a bit more in the uncomfy category of the game’s merriment is that Epic Games and Disney announced today that players will also be able to chat with Darth Vader, despite his legendary voice actor, James Earl Jones, passing away last year, thanks to AI. In a new post on Fortnite’s official website, titled “This Will Be a Day Long Remembered: Speak with Darth Vader in Fortnite,” Epic Games revealed that players can “strategize with the ultimate Sith Lord” using their voice. Moreover, Jones’ Darth Vader voice will respond to them in kind, “using conversational AI”—more specifically, Google’s Gemini 2.0 and ElevenLabs’ Flash v2.5 models. The blog post promotes the new feature, stating that player ... Read full article.