Modders Teach GTA V Characters to Respond to Players in Real Time Using Their Own Voices

Modders have combined several modern AI technologies to bring NPCs to life.

Universal-Modder recently introduced a mod for Grand Theft Auto V that lets players talk to its characters. The project, called NPCTalk, is an AI-based system that takes input from a microphone and generates character responses in real time.

The system uses Fish Audio, a tool for text-to-speech and voice cloning. A player can speak to a character in Grand Theft Auto V, and the system answers as the NPC in a cloned voice in “about a second.” The technical documentation lists a latency of 1.2 to 2.2 seconds. The system can also link a character’s line to an action and animations.

universal-modder@universalmodhq

NPCs can talk back now!

Introducing NPCTalk: make the NPCs of any game talk in realtime. I made every NPC in GTA V answer to me in character, in their own cloned voice, in under 1s, and they act on what you say.

We packaged all the skills Claude learned into a single repo,

1:29

October 16, 2026 at 12:28 · Open in X

The modders said they packaged all the skills that the AI Claude learned into a single repository built on open models. For example, they used NVIDIA Nemotron ASR for transcription, Qwen 3.8 27B for real-time dialogue, and Fish Audio Drama 3 for cloned voices.

NPCTalk has a GitHub page in a repository under the username christos-antono. Because it is a tool rather than a narrowly specialized mod, other tech enthusiasts may try to adapt it for other games.