Convai, the conversational AI NPC platform for games previously featured in NVIDIA's Kairos demo showcased at CES 2024, just shared a slew of announcements for GDC 2024.
At San Francisco's convention, Convai is showing off its new Project Neural Nexus demo, once again featuring a cyberpunk theme. The project was led by Creative Director Sakura Rabbit and made in collaboration with Unity, leveraging Behavior, a prerelease feature from Unity Muse (Unity's AI-powered platform for accelerating real-time 3D and game development), to enhance its perception and action system for AI characters. You can check out the demo below.
Convai also announced a series of new features for its AI NPC platform:
- Convai Connect: This new feature will mitigate the risks of potential runaway costs associated with real-time AI-based character interactions in games, allowing end users to seamlessly use their Convai account to play the developer's game. This approach eliminates the need for developers to pay upfront licensing fees or worry about unpredictable costs. In addition, Convai incentivizes developers by sharing revenue when users upgrade to a paid subscription through their game.
- Narrative Design: This feature gives game developers and narrative designers more control over their AI characters. It provides characters with agency and purpose, allowing them to drive conversations and actions towards a pre-determined set of outcomes while maintaining an open-ended generative nature and encouraging emergent actions and behaviors.
- Long-term character memory: Enables game characters to remember end users, fostering deeper, more personalized relationships. Characters can now have memories of players based on previous conversations and experiences, remember player preferences and choices, and adapt to player style for a truly unique experience.
- Multilingual Support: Taking into account the global diversity of languages, this feature is critical to the widespread adoption of human-like AI systems in games and digital human applications. Currently supporting 21 languages, Convai is committed to expanding its language repertoire to ensure more inclusive and accessible AI interactions across different cultures and geographies.
- Modding Framework: Allows studios to easily integrate AI-driven NPCs into their existing titles to drive further engagement and retention. Convai intends to work closely with both AAA and indie titles to enable players to engage more deeply with both familiar and new characters.
- Test Framework: Provides a complete set of test suites that enable designers and developers to robustly test AI NPC characters to ensure they remain within the intended paradigm, allowing for the creation of character-specific test sets through a feedback mechanism. Developers will be able to test across different character versions. It focuses on identifying how updates affect character behavior, particularly in edge cases, ensuring consistency with game lore, and mitigating unintentional knowledge leakage.
Last but certainly not least, Convai has partnered with two developers to integrate their technology into their games. One is the 20-year-old online virtual world Second Life; the other is the real-time strategy game Stormgate, which launches soon in early access.
Purnendu Mukherjee, Founder at Convai, said:
At GDC we are thrilled to be unveiling and showcasing the evolution of our AI NPC technology, with a host of new features and innovative updates that help drive game development forward. Games and virtual worlds such as Second Life from Linden Lab and many others are going live with Convai-powered AI characters in their game and applications to drive engagement and utility from their end users.
Brad Oberwager, chairman of Linden Lab, stated:
We're excited to partner with Convai to bring its conversational AI into Second Life to add new and exciting engagement experiences to our community. This partnership is just the latest example of our ongoing commitment to innovation in virtual worlds as Second Life has been a pioneer and leader in the establishment of digital economies, cultures, and communities. These AI characters can not only ease the learning curve for new users by providing necessary information, but also help entertain and engage them by giving them a tour of the virtual world, carrying out different actions based on conversation, and connecting them with other players and characters.
Tim Morten, CEO of Frost Giant Studios, added:
We're exploring the potential to leverage AI characters in Stormgate's story campaign, and we've been impressed by Convai's ability to drive freeform conversation with existing 3D models from our game.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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