Replica Studios Shut Down. Here Is an Alternative for Game Voices and AI NPCs
Replica Studios was one of the first AI voice companies built for games. It offered licensed AI voice actors, plugins for Unity, Unreal and iClone, and in 2023 the first SAG-AFTRA agreement covering AI voices in games.
On June 30, 2025, Replica shut down. Its API stopped working, and users who had not exported their audio before the deadline lost access to it. If you had a project built on Replica voices, you have probably been looking for a replacement since.
What Replica users need now
Most Replica users needed one of two things:
- Voice-over lines generated from a script, for cutscenes and barks.
- Speaking characters, where an NPC answers the player out loud.
Plenty of TTS services cover the first. The second needs more than a voice: the character has to understand the player, stay in character, and react in the game. That is where Neocortex comes in.
Replica Studios vs Neocortex
| Replica Studios | Neocortex | |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Shut down June 30, 2025 | Active, with regular SDK releases |
| Voices | Licensed AI voice actors | Voice cloning from a short sample, voice design from a text description |
| Speaking NPCs | Smart NPCs demo for Unreal | Full AI characters with voice in and voice out |
| Engines | Unity, Unreal, iClone plugins | Unity, Unreal, Godot (beta), Web API |
| Character design | Not available | Visual node editor |
Why Neocortex works as a Replica replacement
Your voices, recreated. Clone a voice from a recording of ten seconds or more, or describe the voice you want and pick from generated options. Then give that voice to any character.
Characters that talk back. Players can speak to an NPC, and it answers in its own voice, streamed so the reply starts quickly. Personality, emotion, knowledge and actions are set in a visual editor, and the character can trigger gameplay, not only speak.
Works in Unity WebGL too. Unity does not support microphone input in WebGL builds out of the box; the Neocortex SDK does.
Less lock-in risk. Replica's closure showed what happens when your whole voice pipeline lives on one cloud service. Neocortex lets you prototype with open models running locally, and studios can run the platform on their own infrastructure.
Moving your project over
- Create a free Neocortex account.
- Recreate each character's voice with voice cloning or voice design.
- Build the character in the editor and talk to it in the browser.
- Install the Unity SDK or Unreal plugin and connect the character to your NPC.
Details about Replica Studios come from public reporting on its closure, checked October 2026.
Written by
Sercan Altundas
Date
Oct 17, 2026
Read time
3 min
