Yep, there is an AI in our game, and its’ just like AI in all other games. They perform like a computer, provide quests and feedbacks, make a good company to the player. However, all those things does not make it intelligence from my perspective. It’s more like a pre-scripted respond machine.
In my understanding, when you call something AI, it should be actually smart enough to at least understand some of the things you are talking. Like a smart chatbot or Siri, it understands the context of the conversation. Based outhouse thoughts, I started to search more some real AI that could potentially be implemented into the game.
The solution I found is IBM Watson, which to my surprise, also provide services for the game company. More surprising, it even have decent integration with unity engine. I did a search and it turns out that Watson API provides quite a few linguistic function, like understanding the sentence and make prediction. Or real out the sentence like human.
In my attempts, my idea is to use the Watson read out API to read the player’s name out into the conversation, instead of ignoring the player’s name entirely. However, due to the stage of current technology and perhaps my limited understanding of the API, the result is quite disappointing, the audio feels very robotics, in a way that it sounds just strange. And it cannot match our voiceover’s recordings.
It turns out that human’s recording, at the time I’m writing this article, is still better than one of even the best AI out there. But from this experiment, I do see the potential there. I deeply believe some day in the near future, the game AI will no longer just be a respond machine, but an actual intelligence that could under player’s intend and response accordingly.