Starting July 30, 2025, Fortnite creators can publish islands where players talk to characters out loud and get spoken replies back, generated by artificial intelligence. Epic Games has been testing this feature with a small group of creators since earlier this year. Now it is moving out of the testing phase.

Epic has prepared 36 AI characters with what the company describes as "consistent voices and personas." These are characters creators can place in their custom Fortnite islands. The lineup includes familiar Fortnite characters like Agent Jonesy, Peely (a banana), Fishstick (a walking fish), and Cuddle Team Leader (who wears a pink bear mascot head), among others. The Verge

The voices are based on recordings from professional voice actors who were hired specifically for this purpose. The actors agreed to let their performances be used to train voice models — computer programs that can generate new spoken responses that sound like them. This is different from copying an existing voice or imitating a celebrity. Epic recorded new performances with contracts written around this specific use.

Epic previously tested the concept with a Darth Vader NPC powered by James Earl Jones' voice, a collaboration that Jones' estate approved. That served as an early public test of whether real-time, voice-driven character interaction could work at scale.

The AI that powers the character conversations is Google's Gemini, a large language model that can generate text responses in real time. Fortnite News Players talk to the characters through voice chat, and the AI produces spoken replies that stay in character. Epic Games Developer Documentation

Creators using Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN), the tool for building custom islands, enable the persona_component within Experimental Scene Graph features and check LLM-Powered under Experimental Access to set up a character. The v41.20 Ecosystem Updates and Release Notes on Epic's developer documentation site cover the current state of the feature set. Epic Games Developer Documentation Fortnite News

Epic started letting creators test their own AI characters earlier in 2025, with rules to keep them from becoming problematic. The move from testing to general availability means creators can now publish islands with AI conversations to the live Fortnite game, where anyone can play them — not just test them privately.

Epic's next stated step is to work with relevant guilds (unions for actors) and voice actors from Fortnite Battle Royale to explore making their original voices available across the Fortnite ecosystem. That signals an intent to grow the voice library beyond the initial 36 characters, though the outcome of those guild negotiations is not yet determined.

Here is how the system works behind the scenes: a player speaks into voice chat, the audio is converted to text and sent to Gemini, the AI generates a character-appropriate reply, that text is turned into speech using a voice model trained on a specific actor's performance, and the audio plays back in the game. All of this has to happen fast enough to feel like a natural conversation — think of how a phone call feels laggy when the delay is too long. And this is running inside a game platform that serves millions of players at the same time.

The way Epic has handled consent is worth paying attention to, because it matters as much as the technology itself. By hiring actors to record new performances under contracts written specifically for AI voice training, rather than pulling existing recordings or licensing a deceased person's voice, Epic has built a framework that avoids the most heated disputes around AI voice work. The SAG-AFTRA actors' strike in 2023 was largely driven by this exact issue. Epic's approach of contracting actors for AI-specific performances, along with the earlier Darth Vader estate collaboration, puts the company on the more defensible side of an argument the industry has not fully resolved.

The expansion into guild negotiations for original Fortnite Battle Royale voice actors is the next test of that framework. Whether guilds accept AI voice model training as a paid category of work, and on what terms, will shape how broadly the character library can grow and what precedent it sets for other platforms.

For creators, the practical change on July 30 is simple: islands with talking NPCs can go live. For the broader industry, it is one of the first large-scale deployments of real-time AI-driven character conversation inside a mainstream consumer platform, running on infrastructure that pairs Google's AI model with Epic's voice technology and creator tools.