Who would be interested in a chat Ai engine for their game?

[beyonder]

We were just wondering... (me) ...if anyone might be interested in integrating an advanced chatbot engine into their characters and NPCs?

We've been developing the Ai conversation engine for 5 years now. And we do have some games that we've made using it... but we can see its potential in games like Oblivion or RPGs where you can chat with the characters, get valuable information from them, build relationships with them... etc, because the Ai can of course learn too.

How much would you be willing to pay for an advanced chatbot feature for your game? How much do you think a company like Matrix who makes the Sims would be willing to pay?

The other way I was thinking is if we could put together a team. I've never tried this before... I mean I have worked on teams... but we've (me) never created an RPG game with our chat engine yet.

Its pretty cool stuff... it's more than chat of course. The Ai personality can be trained to "be" anything... including feelings and emotions. 

[rootsage]

Do you have any type of demo that shows the features and how advanced your AI system is?

I would have to say AI systems can be pretty valuable, just because it can be amoung the more difficult of systems to develop. I cannot give a price range though, I don't know enough about the market sorry...

If it were somewhat reasonable price ($600-800 USD, of course if we can get it for a less expensive price that is always nice too ) for the project we are working on, I would surely implement it. Do you plan on having a source license?

[beyonder]

Hey rootsage,

You can check our demos here. Write us thru the contact form and we'll set you up with a license past the trial.

http://aibliss.com/

http://karigirl.com/

Be warned... you will encounter hot babes at these sites and that the Ai personalities included are geared more toward adults... it was the first market we thought of to make us some money (which it is). But like I said, an Ai can be trained to be a sorceres witch from Abdimia for example! 

We were thinking $500-800 as well...

Well, it's a fully working Ai conversation system. All we would really have to do is create a simple demo and rudementary docs... in other words "package it up".

Being it's a new "frontier"... this is our first test of the waters. 

I'm not totally sure about a source license yet... darn. That's gonna take more thinking... cuz we believe major companies might be interested too.

[Hypnotron]

I think it could be fairly successful if it was well implemented.

It'd have to showcase in the form of demos\videos some impressive functionality that is able to hint at new avenues for future game design as well as show that you've also thought about and solved a lot of the new problems the use of such a library\engine creates.  Imagine how dealing with Half-Life 1.0's Barney would (need to) differ if using your engine as opposed to a more traditional scripting system.

It'd have to demonstrably solve problems associated with NPC's interacting with many unique users each with a unique relationship/context/history towards a specific user and to do so in a way that is cpu/memory/storage/bandwidth efficient.   

It'd be better to market it as a Personality Engine for Autonomous Virtual(Synthetic) Agents or something rather than a chat bot engine.  You would emphasize features such as recall and remembrance, natural language processing, synthetic emotions, authentic reactions given user's avatar's actions as well (wielding a gun or sword while engaging in friendly convo is suspicious behavior and the npc would act appropriately). (Fable II 's dog seems to have done some good things in this regard)

Bonus points if it could be extended with a scripting language like Lua.

Bonus points if it was a complete AI solution with behavior trees, path finding, steering, etc.

It'd have to be written in C++ to be taken seriously by any company like Maxis/Electronic Arts.

I think this is a huge and difficult task to go from chat-bot to sophisticated 3rd party library that people will not merely find useful, but which can expand the design of games.

[beyonder]

Thanks Hypnotron, kick-butt ideas, one and all.

For now, it strictly is a chat engine. It is written in C++ as a standalone DLL so that its fast. All our other game code like character animations, reactions to the current conversation, are just written into the game... which involves some juggling.

The other thing is... that each Ai personality needs to be taught. And this is so time consuming. It's like bringing up a child to adulthood. We know the abilities our Ai engine has... but writing and teaching the personality is time consuming. We are thinking of creating several template systems... like a personality creation wizard.

Yeah... but its coming. Someone is going to get there first.