Xbox announced this morning that they have signed a multi-year partnership with Inworld AI to bring generative AI to video games. The company hopes to create narrative and dialogue-focused tools using AI to enhance the gaming experience in future titles.
With Inworld AI’s help, Xbox is looking to implement a toolset that will allow game developers to create more advanced dialogue and storytelling features in their games. The toolset’s two main features are an AI “design copilot” that will provide suggestions and guidance during the game creation process itself. The other tool is an AI character runtime engine that handles the dynamic generation of quests, dialogue, story paths, and the like.
Haiyan Zhang, the General Manager of Gaming AI at Xbox, also commented on Xbox’s plans to support all sorts of studios in this endeavor:
As with all creators tools we make at Xbox, our goal is to deliver state-of-the-art AI tools for game developers of any size, anywhere in the world and on every platform where players want to play. We want to help make it easier for developers to realize their visions, try new things, push the boundaries of gaming today and experiment to improve gameplay, player connection and more. We will collaborate and innovate with game creators inside Xbox studios as well as third-party studios as we develop the tools that meet their needs and inspire new possibilities for future games.
Inworld AI is a fairly new AI company. On their website, they boast a founding team whose previous accomplishments include API.AI, which is now Google’s Dialogflow, an incredibly popular conversational AI platform. Additionally, they claim to have put together a masterful team of experienced “engineers, designers, inventors, creatives, scientists, and technologists,” all of whom are seasoned experts in their respective fields.
We’ve seen several smaller developers begin experimenting with AI like language learning models in their games, but Xbox has the potential to scale these experiences to a much greater level. With a proper budget and a well-developed toolset, AI in gaming could become seriously polished and provide a very unique yet fulfilling experience for every player.
Does the potential for AI in gaming excite you or concern you? Let us know down in the comments.
This partnership with Inworld is likely a part of Xbox’s larger structure shake-ups that have occurred lately, the most recent of which being Sarah Bond’s promotion to Xbox President. You can read all about those here.