A way to revive a cult voice. The company specializing in artificial intelligence ElevenLabs has obtained the agreement of the family of voice actor Alain Dorval to recreate his voice for the release of the French version of a new film by Sylvester Stallone, announced this Friday January 10 the Variety website.
Alain Dorval, French actor specializing in dubbing, died in February 2024 at the age of 77, after several years of fighting illness. The man was mainly known for having dubbed the American actor Sylvester Stallone in most of his feature films, the “Rocky” and “Rambo” sagas in the lead, but also the character of Pat Hibulaire at Disney.
Honoring “the know-how and heritage” of Alain Dorval
His family gave their consent for his voice to be exploited using artificial intelligence as part of a partnership between the company Lumière Ventures and ElevenLabs for the French dubbing of Sylvester Stallone’s latest film, “Armor”, released in November in the United States. There is no question of a cinema release, it is on Amazon Prime Video that the work should be broadcast in March.
But the legendary voice of Alain Dorval will be there again. “We wanted to do something that honors the know-how and legacy of my father,” Aurore Bergé, daughter of Alain Dorval and current minister responsible for Equality between women and men and the fight against discrimination.
“There is a big difference between artificially creating a new voice – something my father was firmly opposed to – and bringing back to life an actor whose voice is deeply anchored in our collective imagination,” she explains in this text cited by Variety.
“Recreating the voice of Alain Dorval is an opportunity to show how technology can honor tradition while creating new possibilities in film production,” added Mati Staniszewski, CEO of ElevenLabs, a company whose technology AI is capable of handling no less than 32 languages.
