Jacek Rozenek, the Polish voice actor who has voiced Geralt since the first Witcher game, suffered a sudden stroke in 2019 that left his voice deep and hoarse. For the production of The Witcher 3: Old Times' Song, CDPR did not recast the role; instead, they had Rozenek personally record the new lines and processed them through Respeecher's AI to maintain consistency with his previous voice work.
CDPR has confirmed that the Polish-language lines for Geralt in The Witcher 3: Old Times' Song, recorded by Jacek Rozenek, will be processed using Respeecher's voice conversion technology. Rozenek suffered a sudden stroke in 2019 that left him unable to speak for several months, after which he rebuilt his voice through intensive rehabilitation.
Rozenek still personally records every new line, after which Respeecher uses a model built on his initial recordings from The Witcher 3 (including approximately 10,000 lines from the base game) to reshape the audio, ensuring consistency between the new and old dialogue. CDPR described this arrangement as a special circumstance due to Rozenek's health condition, while its localization producer also acknowledged that AI is a significant concern among voice actors.
Stroke, Long Recovery, and a Brief Comeback
Rozenek has been voicing Geralt (in Polish) since the release of The Witcher series in 2007. In 2019, he suffered a sudden stroke that left him unable to speak for several months. As he revealed to Game File, he underwent six to seven hours of speech therapy daily during his recovery. In 2021, as his speech abilities improved, he made a brief return to record lines for a quest in The Witcher 3's next-gen console update (released in 2022). He told Game File that even this short recording session left him exhausted.
His current voice is noticeably deeper and hoarser than it was when The Witcher 3 was first released in 2015.
Why New Lines Might Clash with Old Ones
Announced in May, Old Times' Song is being co-developed by Fool's Theory and is the third story DLC for The Witcher 3, scheduled for a paid release in 2027. It will bring entirely new dialogue, battle cries, reactions, and quips for Geralt, many of which will play alongside thousands of voice lines Rozenek recorded over a decade ago. In 2014, he recorded about 10,000 lines for the base game, and later participated in the Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine DLCs.
About a year ago, CDPR invited Jacek Rozenek to the studio to hear his current voice, localization producer Mikołaj Szwed told Game File. The studio needed to assess how much his voice had changed due to both the passage of time and his health condition. This meeting confirmed the studio's concerns: new lines recorded with Rozenek might not match the original audio, which often plays immediately afterward. With Rozenek's consent, CDPR contacted Respeecher, a Ukrainian voice cloning company they had worked with before.
How Respeecher Recreated Rozenek's Performance
Rozenek recorded the lines as usual, and then Respeecher converted the audio to match the format of his previous performances. "We basically handed over all the lines Jacek recorded for The Witcher 3 to Respeecher," said Szwed. Dmytro Vasylyets, a synthetic voice artist at Respeecher, told Game File that the most challenging part was capturing Rozenek's rich emotional range, from half-tones and shouts to groans and laughter.
According to Kotaku, Rozenek told Game File that their goal was to recreate his voice from 12 years ago as closely as possible, and that he trusts the game developers. He himself has not heard the AI-processed voice. CDPR also stated that they do not plan to continue altering his voice in future projects, suggesting that his deeper, hoarser tone might be more suitable for an older Geralt in games like The Witcher 4.
CDPR's Second Respeecher Project
This is not the first time CDPR has collaborated with Respeecher. Mirosław Zbrojewicz, who voiced Ripperdoc Viktor Vektor in the Polish version of Cyberpunk 2077 and Vesemir in the Polish version of The Witcher 3, passed away in December 2021 at the age of 60. In the Phantom Liberty expansion released in September 2023, actor Janusz Zadura voiced Viktor, and Respeecher converted these recordings into Zbrojewicz's voice with permission from his family.
The case of The Witcher 3 differs significantly from previous instances: Rozenek is alive, agreed to participate in the voice acting, and personally performs every line. Szwed acknowledged that artificial intelligence remains a major concern for him when collaborating with voice actors worldwide, but he believes that in this case, AI can be "used ethically, with consent, and in a way that benefits others."