Iconic has launched its 'Digital Actor' tech, designed to bring real-time conversations with digital characters to immersive entertainment.
Iconic’s new technology sees a ‘Digital Actor’ non-player character (NPC) listen, respond, and adapt to each conversation with users in real time. This technology is showcased in Iconic’s new immersive experience, Pressure Point, where players must use voice-control to save a failing submarine by talking an officer through an impossible decision.
These NPCs are designed to generate natural and reactive responses that guide the player towards the defined conclusion of the experience, despite the unpredictability of how the player chooses to interact with them.
This approach relies on three AI models where a player’s speech is transcribed by an automated speech recognition model. Once transcribed, a large language model decides how the scene should pivot within the narrative blueprint and crafts the next performance beat, with a new design of text-to-speech model that turns the beat into a voice.
The LLM’s responses are directed by a custom orchestration layer that acts as a guardrail, maintaining immersion by ensuring that responses stay relevant, consistent, and aligned with the intended experience.
A custom on-device ContextualText-to-Speech model is also used, designed for real-time dramatic performance, that ensures that the ‘Digital Actor’ characters don’t sound like chatbots, but instead have a more realistic human-like cadence.
During testing, Wesley Kerr, head of technology research at a large game studio, tested Pressure Point, exploring the capabilities and limits of the ‘Digital Actor’ concept. Kerr said: “The natural-language conversation was really good. What stood out is that I could explore around the writing and have a real conversation in the space we were walking through together, rather than being dropped in front of an NPC and told to ‘go ahead and talk to it.’ About 99% of these demos fail at exactly that, whereas Iconic actually brought me in and gave me something to talk about. I'm someone who normally finds talking to an NPC out loud awkward, and here I didn't; it felt natural and easy.”
Andrew Bowell, CEO and co-founder, Iconic, commented: “Immersive entertainment should feel truly responsive, with stories that adapt to players rather than forcing players to adapt to them. The launch of Iconic’s Digital Actor technology represents years of work to make that vision a reality, with Pressure Point demonstrating what's possible when AI is utilised in immersive entertainment.”