The Finals Adds AI Commentators That Call Players by Their Usernames

Embark Studios has added a new Dynamic Commentary feature to The Finals. In-game commentators Scotty and June can now call out players by their usernames mid-match when they pull off something impressive. The feature arrived on October 20 with the launch of Season 12, PRIME TIME, and was announced two days earlier in a short video on the game’s official X account.

Previously, the commentators reacted to events without naming anyone, for example by simply praising a nice headshot. Now, in moments like that, you’ll also hear the username of the player who landed it. The Finals audio director Carl Strandberg explained that this way a player’s name can become part of the show, since in the game’s story, every match is a televised game show.

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For now, the feature is in beta and only works in some game modes. Scotty will react to a limited set of events: wiping an entire enemy team, intercepting a cashout, and reviving several teammates in a row. According to Strandberg, keeping the scope this narrow lets the team control exactly what Scotty says and make sure the commentary sounds good and true to the character. The developers plan to expand the feature later.

If you don’t want the commentators to say your username, you can turn on Anonymous mode or Streamer mode.

The Finals has used AI speech synthesis trained on the voices of hired actors for its commentary since launch. Because of this, the game has repeatedly drawn criticism from the community and professional voice actors, and the new feature only continues that approach.

Players and journalists are also worried the feature will be abused. The most obvious problem is that players could create accounts with offensive usernames just to make the AI say them out loud. Embark hasn’t explained how it will filter such usernames, but the limited list of situations will most likely help hold back this kind of abuse to some extent.