Sony seems to be experimenting with the technology to create chatty, AI-powered characters that can respond to verbal questions during gameplay, as a leaked internal video has shown off a prototype of Horizon Forbidden West's Aloy doing just that.
The video – which has now been taken down from YouTube following a copyright strike – was revealed by The Verge (after being shared by an anonymous source), and is presented by Sharwin Raghoebardajal from PlayStation Studios Advanced Technology Group. He explains that the tech demo uses OpenAI's speech recognition model, Whisper, to turn voice into text, as well as Llama 3 and GPT-4 for "the conversation and decision making."
Furthermore, it uses Sony's own Emotional Voice Synthesis system to generate Aloy's speech, although Raghoebardajal adds that none of the "emotional settings" have been touched yet (and you can definitely tell). Finally, an internal system called Mockingbird is used to power Aloy's facial movements, converting audio to animation.
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All that's to say that this is an AI-powered interactive character, through and through. The prototype, which we see running in Horizon Forbidden West, allows users to speak to Aloy both in an "interview" setting and during gameplay, to ask her questions about herself, her surroundings, and general gameplay mechanics. For example, while roaming the world, she's asked if she can see any enemies around her, and further prompted to explain what their weak spots are, and what weapon she's currently holding.
The whole thing feels slightly less unnerving while used in the game itself (largely due to the facial movements seen in the interview mode just looking a bit off), but the obviously synthesized voice is very offputting regardless. At least in this video, none of Aloy's personality comes across in her responses, either – there's certainly no illusion that it's actually Aloy responding to the questions, but perhaps that's due to the lack of "emotional settings" Raghoebardajal mentions. Not everyone was a fan of the actual character's quips and remarks in Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West, but I'd personally take those any day over this.
Of course, it's worth keeping in mind that, at this stage, this is just a tech demo to give an idea of "what is possible," according to Raghoebardajal. He acknowledges that "we will not go into whether this is fun for games, whether it even makes sense to talk to Aloy when you're her when playing the game, whether we even want to talk to the controller, or where we're going to get the memory from to run this all on a consumer console." Needless to say, there's no guarantee that this sort of thing is ever going to make it into an actual PlayStation game.
While you're here, be sure to check out our picks for the best PS5 games you can play now.
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