[The Mysterious Game Dictionary] NC Employees Reading Books with AI in the Restroom

NCSoft Headquarters Building

[Asia Economy Reporter Bu Aeri] When using the restroom at NCSoft's R&D Center located in Pangyo, Seongnam-si, Gyeonggi-do, you may encounter a surprising situation where you suddenly hear a human voice. "There’s definitely no one here...?" Listening carefully, someone is reading a book aloud.

It is the voice of author Kim Young-ha, who wrote the well-known book The Reason for Travel, very familiar to NCSoft employees. Kim recommends books and reads passages from his works. Thanks to Kim’s voice, employees do not feel lonely while taking care of business. Gaining nourishment for the soul is a bonus.

Kim’s voice is an AI voice developed by NCSoft’s Speech Lab. NCSoft created a deep learning synthesis model based on 10 minutes of voice data recorded by Kim. When text is input, Kim’s voice is naturally generated. NCSoft employees listen to The Reason for Travel in Kim’s voice.

NCSoft launched the 'AI Task Force (TF)' in 2011 and operates two main centers: the AI Center and the NLP Center, under which five labs are run: ▲Game AI Lab ▲Speech Lab ▲Vision AI Lab ▲Language AI Lab ▲Knowledge AI Lab. Currently, there are about 150 specialized developers.

The Speech Lab researches voice technologies such as recognizing natural human conversation and synthesizing specific individuals’ voices from small amounts of voice data. In particular, the 'voice synthesis' technology, which creates voices reflecting a specific person’s intonation and emotional state, has shown research results so realistic that it is difficult to distinguish from actual human speech.

Besides Kim’s voice, you can also hear the voices of Blade & Soul characters Jeong Ha-do and Jin Seo-yeon. Jeong Ha-do reads Romain Gary’s The Life Before Us, and Jin Seo-yeon reads The Last Mrs. Parrish.