Machine Language

One startup’s quest to use AI to bring game dialogue to life

Of their two biggest promises, videogames have pretty much delivered on one. Huge and diverse worlds filled with detail to discover and things to do are now common, even expected. But the other promise, that of getting to interact with characters that respond naturalistically to your every word and action, is still lagging behind.

The NPCs you meet in games are the same scripted talking heads that they’ve always been. Some games are written better than others, but in comparison to the visually opulent and systemically deep worlds in which they stand, NPCs are wooden, their various conversational gambits constricted into series of dialogue trees in which you lose all of the freedoms you enjoyed in the wider world.

One new tech startup is hoping to use AI to help solve the problem of NPC dialogue. SpiritAI’s aim is to create dynamic conversations that feel like speaking to autonomous characters, responsive to what you express and ask, and willing to offer their own points of view. SpiritAI has developed various technologies called Character Engine, which includes natural-language classifiers, speech-totext analysis and keyword examination to interpret what players are trying to say and to construct responses by modelling emotion and the character’s knowledge about the world.

“OK, the far end of this is passing the Turing test, right? If it’s done and complete and perfect, then it talks like a person,” says Emily Short, who manages Character Engine, having long been a leading figure in interactive fiction as a writer and co-developer of various text-adventure engines. “And no, we’re not there yet.” But, she says, Character Engine is standing on a road of iterative development that will figure out how to create naturalistic NPCs that are more fun and interesting to encounter in a game.