Reading Time: 3 minutes
Replica Studios is a developer of artificial intelligence (AI), voice platforms for video games. They have announced Replica Studios AI-Powered Smart NPCs, a plugin that will be available in Unreal Engine this year. Smart NPCs use OpenAI, the user’s AI language model or Replica’s library of more than 120 ethically licensed AI voice.
Replica released a Smart NPC Demo experience to demonstrate the revolutionary technology. The demo uses a modified Unreal Engine Matrix Awakens Sample Project in order to show some of the features available with the plugin. You can watch the trailer.
Shreyas Nives, CEO of Replica Studios, said: “At Replica we believe AI Voice has a two-fold potential to further narrative-heavy video games. It eliminates critical bottlenecks and allows studios the ability to tell bigger, immersive stories. And it allows for the creation of living-world gaming experience that shapes around the player’s actions in real-time.” Smart NPCs allow smaller studios that don’t have resources to script or vocalise at scale to dream big, and scale their games up to 10x or 100x the epic adventure.
Replica’s Smart NPC experience will allow AI-powered NPCs to respond dynamically in real-time to the voice of a player. Characters’ dialogue, body language and emotional tone will be altered in response to the way players speak to them. Replica Studios NPCs have more emotions now thanks to Replica Studios Style Morphing Update.
The game designer can also modify the information given to the AI characters in order to have them behave differently, or to have certain personalities. Or they can incorporate their own AI languages models to suit their project.
Nivas said that AI is creating a new genre of virtual experiences with dynamic storytelling, hundreds of characters and quests, and ever-expanding stories. When teams adopt AI to create new experiences, the roles of writers and story designers will change. Instead of writing entire narrative arcs they will create and fine-tune conditions that power AI Smart NPCs. This includes game lore and backstories, motivations and motives.
Replica will launch its Smart NPC plugin for Unreal Engine in the second half of this year. Game developers can then integrate Smart NPCs to their projects to scale up their characters. The plugin integrates AI models for language and Replica’s text-to speech models. It animates characters in real time by matching sound phonemes to audio streams, using a custom blend space to ensure accurate lip sync and custom animation blueprints for NPCs when they are listening, thinking or speaking. The result is an NPC with a natural appearance and behavior that can delight and surprise players by delivering thoughtful, funny and provocative responses based on the player’s personal context and voice input.
The demo is initially a cloud-based solution, but it will eventually be a locally-based solution that provides a multi-user simultaneous live experience with low latency.
“Within the next technological leap, we will see AI-powered Smart NPC virtual experiences and live games with hundreds of concurrent live players and NPCs with no more latencies than a zoom video with hundreds of participants,” concluded Nivas.
The official website of Replica Studios offers a playable Smart NPC demo. Please visit the registration page to sign up for Smart NPC’s beta. Please read the blog post for more information on Smart NPCs.
