Convai's AI NPC tech continues to take small steps forward

Over the past year, Convai has been looking to innovate with its AI-powered non-playable characters. It's a process that has shown itself to be promising, if flawed. Of course, something like this isn't going to reach any state close to perfection without a ton of work and some growing pains. Still, Convai's technology appears to be progressing at a decent rate. During our time at this year's Game Developers Conference, Shacknews swung by the Convai offices to take another first-hand peek at the company's AI NPC tech.

One of the key demos Convai showed off was Project Neural Nexus. Running on Unity, this demo takes players to a strange cyberpunk dystopia. We were barely given any narrative background as to how we got here before a woman named Seraph came to retrieve us. She expressed a sense of urgency, but we were encouraged to ask any questions we may have had. We ran through a few of them: Where are we? How did we get here? What is this place? Who the heck are you? If I tipped 15 percent at a steak dinner, does that make me a cheapskate? Seraph was able to answer many of these questions with the information she had available to her. It was a remarkable piece of work... mostly.

As impressive as this tech was, there were still some flaws on display. Seraph sounded totally robotic, constantly talking in a dull monotone and talking a mile a minute. As impressive as the environments were, the AI voiceover broke any sense of immersion that the demo was aiming for. It's a good start for Convai, but there's clearly still work to be done.

This was also true of a different tech demo, one that simulated a scene out of War of the Worlds movie. This demo, running on Unreal Engine, would take players to the scene of an alien attack. The object is to convince anyone standing around gawking at what's out in the distance that something dangerous is coming and they should flee for their lives.

After feeling a disconnect from the monotone voices, I opted to have some fun with this. After a few rounds of yelling at people that aliens are coming, I started to shout out that Godzilla was on his way and that there's an ice cream truck coming around the corner. If nothing else, I got some laughs out of this and saw the potential for more creative uses for this kind of tech. If nothing else, there's potential for AI NPCs to encourage players to go off the beaten path and freely stray away from any given script.

While Convai's tech needs some more time in the oven, some developers aren't waiting. Second Life has begun integrating AI NPCs into parts of its experience, having them function as tutorial tour guides of sorts. Frost Giant Studios is already leveraging Convai's AI NPCs into its upcoming story campaign for Stormgate. And, of course, Convai and NVIDIA have previously announced that they're working together to help bring the latter's emerging AI technology forward. This is without even mentioning that Convai is already working to make its AI NPCs multilingual and give them long-term memory to remember what players previously asked them. We weren't quite able to test out the latter feature, but it should be interesting to see how that pans out.

What Convai has been able to put together in such a short time has been impressive. The company was only founded in 2022 and that it's been able to develop this type of AI tech in just a few years is quite a feat. AI NPCs still have a long way to go, but I'm intrigued to see how it shapes up with another year or two of refinement. Those interested in learning more about Convai's work can head over to the Convai website.

This preview is based on a live demo from the Convai offices in San Francisco, CA during the 2024 Game Developers Conference.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?