The actor behind the voice of Star Wars villain Darth Vader has granted Disney permission to recreate his voice artificially for future productions of the franchise.
James Earl Jones's famous, ominous tones are likely to be replicated by an AI voice-modelling tool called Respeecher, which trains text-to-speech machine-learning models with licensed and released recordings of actors.
James Earl Jones first voiced Darth Vader in the original 1977 Star Wars movie and went on to reprise the role in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. He continued voicing the iconic character in later films, including the first instalment of the Star Wars anthology series, Rogue One, and the third instalment of the sequel trilogy, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
Now, however, Star Wars sound supervising editor Matthew Wood has told Vanity Fair that the 91-year-old actor "was looking into winding down this particular character".
The iconic character...