Yuki Kaji: Voice AI Enters Voice Acting Competition

The Yoyogi Animation Academy, together with Yuki Kaji's company FRACTAL, is holding a commercial narration competition in which students combine speech synthesis software based on Kaji's voice with their own voices. Students at nine of the academy's campuses can take part; Kaji takes on the role of jury chair.

AI Voice and Real Voice Performance in One Entry

For the competition, participants use the official speech synthesis software "梵そよぎ", which is based on Kaji's voice. The task is to combine the synthetic voice with one's own voice performance and develop an original advertising narration from it. There is no fixed theme, so students can decide the concept and staging themselves.

In addition to students from voice acting and entertainment, participants from the anime sound field can also contribute. The academy explicitly envisions joint productions that bring together voice acting and audio expertise. Entries will be judged by Kaji and other industry representatives from the FRACTAL network.

Kaji does not describe voice AI as a replacement for human voice actors, but as an additional means of expression. What matters, he says, is how the artificially generated voice is combined with the variations, emotions and energy of real performances. The competition is intended to test this way of working in practice already during training.

Yuki Kaji Connects Voice Acting and Voice AI

Yuki Kaji founded FRACTAL in April 2026 and produces the voice AI project Soyogi Fractal. As a voice actor, he is known, among other roles, as Eren Jaeger from Attack on Titan and Shoto Todoroki from My Hero Academia.

With the competition, FRACTAL is for the first time deliberately bringing its software based on Kaji's voice into a training format. The Yoyogi Animation Academy aims to enable students not only to learn about speech synthesis technically, but to use it together with their own voice performance in a complete production process.