For manufacturers and publishers like Microsoft and Sony, as well as for the biggest studios, generative AI is seen as a technology capable of accelerating video game development, and therefore reducing increasingly high budgets. Now we need to find the right way to use it.
It's unnatural
Like the rest of the industry, Sony is trying things out to make generative AI profitable, but one might wonder about the first bot prototype released by the PlayStation Studios Advanced Technology Group. A video by Sony's software engineering director, Sharwin Raghoebardajal, has been shared on social media. He presents a chatbot project in the form of Aloy, the heroine of the Horizon franchise, a staple of PlayStation. Developed with the help of Guerrilla Studios, The origin of Horizon, this bot listens to the user's questions and answers them with a synthetic voice, while moving its head and shoulders like a video game character (which it basically is!). Among the technologies used are GPT-4 and Llama 3, from OpenAI and Meta respectively, as well as Sony's in-house systems: Emotional Voice Synthesis (EVS) for voice generation and Mockingbird for facial animation.
It There is nothing less natural than this demonstration: the responses are bland, the lip movements give the impression that Aloy has a fake mouth, and the whole thing has a very distinct flavor of "uncanny valley," that valley of the strange where robots try to pass themselves off as humans.
According to The Verge, which was able to consult the video in its entirety before its removal from YouTube, Sony would have demonstrated this technology internally a year ago, then presented an improved version during the Sony Technology Exchange Fair (STEF) which took place in Tokyo in November. The demo runs on a PC, but it could also run on PS5. It's a long way from imagining the appearance of chatbots in all PlayStation games in the future.
On the one hand, you have to find a purpose for it in the game, other than chatting. And what impact will this have on game developers and voice actors?
Source: The Verge
0 Comments