In his track "Rap God," Eminem takes aim at a common criticism of his rap style: "They said I rap like a robot, so call me a rap bot.

This is a fairly common criticism in hip-hop circles and has been applied to many artists less famous than Eminem. Your singing style is monotonous, your rhymes are bland and not pleasing to the ear.

Well, thanks to an AI voice company called Replica and its employees' jokey semi-cursed results in a "hackathon" (thanks Verge), we may have to rethink things.

Surprisingly, the rap itself was done by one individual and split between various AI actors; Replica employee Shreyas told PCG, "One Replica team member performed the entire rap. When we run his recorded source through our system, we can apply that tone/style/performance to over 50 (and growing) AI voices."

Some interesting lines.

"So you may find that I am a virtual actor,

literally breaking new ground like a tractor."

Not bad, but what would make it perfect would be an AI with the voice of Norfolk's greatest DJ, Alan Partridge.

"The video itself was created in-house during the hackathon using a feature that is currently under development," Shreyas explains. 'The feature itself is purely about applying the same cadence/timing/delivery from the source recording to our AI voice. The fact that we can go so far as to actually perform the rap is very cool and an unintended consequence of a feature that was initially intended only to add perfectly timed lip-sync to videos and 3D animations. For example, here is the same feature applied to Unreal Engine's Metahumans.

The feature will be available later this year after debuting at GDC in July. Essentially, it will allow developers to use a large number of voice-acted characters with accurate lip-sync and intonation without having to go through the process of animating and recording every line individually. Depending on the outcome, this could be a big step forward for smaller developers. Right now we laugh at virtual rappers, but in a few years this technology could be used in half of the games we play.