Characters in games and other digital experiences tend to be rather static, working from a set of lines and responses written long ago. But the future of games could be more responsive, generative, and of course AI-powered -- something Inworld AI is attempting to enable with a newly available beta tool that lets developers create a rich, interactive characters as simply as they might tell another AI to draw a bird. Inworld's claims, which it has been putting about over the last year, are that it is able to quickly create NPCs and such like characters with just a few sentences of description and twiddled dials, and that once created they will instantly be deeper and more interesting to interact with than ordinary scripted characters. Now, there are obvious limitations to these claims -- you couldn't, for example, outdo the cryptic utterances of characters in Elden Ring, since those are highly crafted scripts intended to be encountered in a specific way. But what about the lady who runs the weapon shop in a fantasy world?

Here Inworld AI will use natural language processing, emotion recognition, reinforcement learning, and goal-directed conversational AI to enhance the cognitive abilities of virtual characters. Finally, "behavior is about the output or interactions of the character, such as speech gestures, body language, and motion." Technologies like state-of-the-art generative language models, reinforcement learning, and customized voice and emotion synthesis," enable virtual characters to replicate human gestures and behaviors. Together, these three components provide a solid framework for developers to build virtual characters that can respond in detail to natural language, perceive the digital environment, and offer significant interactions for users.