Ubisoft’s new AI will help you talk to non-player characters in video games

French company Ubisoft presented new generative AI NEO NPC, which will help in real-time conversations with non-player characters (NPCs) in video games. To develop its product, the company used NVIDIA’s Audio2Face technology to generate facial animation based on an audio track and a large language model from Inworld to create an AI game engine.

According to the developers, NPC characters are created by humans, not by a neural network. The screenwriter will be able to formulate the character’s personality, his conversation style and history, after which the AI ​​itself will customize the further image. NPCs will be able to produce natural emotions and non-robotic responses. Also, NPCs will remain within the scope of the story objective and will be able to separate player hostility for story reasons from rudeness and insults outside the scope of the story.

Ubisoft notes that the AI ​​requires further tuning, as the characters turn out to be stereotypical, for example, a physically attractive woman will begin to flirt and seduce the player, even if this is not provided for in the script.

In May 2023 Nvidia presented Avatar Cloud Engine service, which is designed to help video game developers create more advanced artificial intelligence NPCs in video games. In March 2023 Ubisoft developed Ghostwriter, a generative AI designed to make it easier for writers to write lines for non-player characters.

Evgeniy Fedunenko