Top Gun: Maverick It is a success for both critics and the public. The first film, released in 1986, was a good boost for Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer’s careers at the time, but in the sequel, the lead role is fully occupied by the first, while the second has a much smaller role.

One of the possible reasons Val Kilmer played a supporting role in Top Gun: Maverick is the serious health problems that have dragged on for the last decade. The actor has lost the ability to speak easily due to the tracheotomy he had in 2017 in the treatment of throat cancer, so he has been using a typewriter ever since. However, Val Kilmer can be seen speaking seemingly smoothly in the original version of Top Gun: Maverick, how was that possible? This is the question we will answer in this post.

Val Kilmer was able to speak in Top Gun: Maverick thanks Sonatic, a London-based artificial intelligence company able to create voice models with actors playing replicas according to established scenarios. The procedure consists in passing the recorded voices to his proprietary voice engine Void Engine, which is dedicated to training the artificial intelligence model. The Voice Engine itself provides various manual and automatic options for verifying the quality of the generated model.

In Kilmer’s case, this process required some manual labor, as the material obtained consisted of recordings of his own voice from when he was still able to speak normally. The company had to work with a limited amount of materialwhich also had to be carefully cleaned to remove background noise without destroying the spoken content. Audio transcripts were then generated and the audio and text were paired into short snippets to create a model that was trained by the Voice Engine, but the resulting data were about 10 times lower in quantitative terms than usual in the project.

Due to the lack of data, the algorithms used in the Voice Engine were not able to offer the necessary results, so Sonatic decided research and implementation of new algorithms that would enable the production of better options from available material. In the end, they managed to generate 40 different voice models and chose the one that worked best in terms of quality and distinctiveness. In addition, new algorithms designed to recreate Val Kilmer’s voice have been introduced into Voice Engine, allowing it to be used by future customers.

Val Kilmer expressed his gratitude to Sonatic through the following words: “I am grateful to the entire Sonantic team for masterfully restoring my voice in a way I never imagined possible. As human beings, the ability to communicate is at the heart of our existence, and because of the effects of throat cancer, it is difficult for others to understand. The opportunity to tell your story in a voice that is authentic and familiar is an incredibly special gift. ”.

Zeena Qureshi, CEO and co-founder of Sonantic, commented on what happened “For nine years, we have been helping children with autism learn to use their voice as a better communication tool. The Val project has once again shown how powerful it can be when people overcome challenges by responding. ”.

It is said there that it was Val Kilmer himself who asked to participate in Top Gun: Maverick. Whether this statement is true or not, its inclusion would most likely not have been possible without Sonatic’s help, so the actor’s gratitude is as motivated as justified.