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For me, the holy grail of gaming involves characters driven by AI that could pass the Turing test, and who could trigger changes in the game world according to your unscripted conversations with them and/or their own decisions.

The first half of that dream is already being developed for different games thanks to the astonishing AI of GPT-4. Check out the progress done for the undying Skyrim (its VR version no less, for added immersion):

These conversations are character-appropriate, so the video is much more impressive if, like me, you’ve known all these characters for about twelve years. The voice generation can be plugged to Eleven Labs’ API for more realistic results, although that would burn plenty of the monthly allowed credits.

Here’s another video of this technology in Skyrim, now using Eleven Labs’ voices:

I love how Ysolda admits to being a drug dealer right in the middle of Whiterun’s market. And what’s with that town guard abusing metaphors?

Here’s more or less the same kind of stuff but with a human being acting like a bastard toward Fallout: New Vegas characters:

The following video is an overview of this technology applied to Skyrim (and other games in general), along with its possibilities and limitations.

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I tend to look up videos that are related to AI, so I figured that I could write about some of the stuff that has interested me on that subject.

First of all, I got back into Fallout 4 a couple of weeks ago, thanks to the Wabbajack modlist “Life in the Ruins.” I was never a big fan of that game; they screwed up the progression right at the beginning, the writing was crap because they guy they had in charge believed that gamers didn’t want more complexity than that (even though games like The Witcher 3 proved him wrong), etc. However, in comparison with the crap that is getting released these days, Fallout 4 is a masterpiece, particularly when the huge mod “Sim Settlements 2” is involved.

Anyway, Eleven Labs and their fantastic AI-generated voices have reached that game. One of the main issues with Fallout 4 regarding modding was that the protagonists (male and female) were voiced, and people could at the most cut up and stitch together parts of sentences that the voice actors had said, because having a silent protagonist when the rest of the game is voiced was too conspicuous, so relatively few quest mods have been made for Fallout 4. However, some people are integrating Eleven Labs AI voices (which I have used to create audiochapters for my current novel) into that game. That allows them to add many more dialogue choices and improve the RPG-ness of the game.

Skyrim was released about eleven years ago, but its modding community has only grown recently. Its protagonists had always been silent, but some modders have made voice packs using characters from other games thanks to Eleven Labs, in case you want, for example, to play Skyrim as Geralt of Rivia (from the game, of course).

One of the holy grails of gaming is having unscripted AI characters. The following demo includes characters that reason and speak autonomously thanks to neural networks (similar to GPT-4, I’m guessing, if not using that through its API). As shown in the video, the player speaks to the game characters directly through his microphone, who speak back with AI-generated voices (which aren’t remotely as good as Eleven Labs’, though).

As the last video, check out the robot below. It recognizes voice commands, it processes them through GPT-4, replies with a competent synthetic voice, and most impressive of all, it acts out the commands it has decided upon. Amazing.