CD Projekt Red to use AI-based lip sync in Cyberpunk 2077

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A nice detail few people notice in an open-world game: characters’ mouths following every syllable, in whichever language is chosen. In October 2020, the presentation that CD Projekt Red and Canadian company JALI Research gave at Siggraph 2020, the computer graphics conference, gained prominence, showing how Cyberpunk 2077 generates lip sync and facial expressions for several languages.

What stands out is the scale. Night City has an enormous amount of dialogue, with branching conversations, and animating all of it by hand in each dubbed language would be unfeasible. JALI’s solution takes the audio recording of each line and the transcript marked up by the animation team, and from that automatically generates the mouth and face animation, already adjusted to the language. In practice, a character dubbed in Brazilian Portuguese doesn’t end up with a mouth “speaking English”, as happened in many dubbed games of the time.

The care also shows in the workflow: JALI says the generated animation is not a black box, but editable curves that animators can refine or blend with motion capture. The talk was presented by Pif Edwards, Chris Landreth, Karan Singh, Eugene Fiume and Sarah Watling, from JALI, and by Mateusz Popławski and Robert Malinowski, from CD Projekt Red. It is in English, but you can turn on YouTube’s automatically translated captions:

What came next

After several delays, Cyberpunk 2077 came out on 10 December 2020 for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Stadia. The story, setting and visuals were praised, but technical problems on last-generation consoles became a controversy and led to lawsuits, settled for US$1.85 million. With updates, the game was reassessed: it reached PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S in February 2022, got the Phantom Liberty expansion and the big 2.0 update in September 2023, and launched on Nintendo Switch 2 in June 2025. By July 2026 it had passed 40 million copies sold. JALI, meanwhile, offers the technology as commercial software for other studios.