The developer of Modbox linked together Windows speech recognition, OpenAI’s GPT-3 AI, and Replica’s natural speech synthesis for a unique demo: arguably one of the first artificially intelligent virtual characters.

Modbox is a multiplayer game creation sandbox with SteamVR support. It officially launched late last year after years of public beta development, though it’s still marked as Early Access. We first tried it back in 2016 for HTC Vive. In some ways Modbox was, and is, ahead of its time.

The developer’s recent test using two state of the art machine learning services – OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model and Replica’s natural speech synthesis – is nothing short of mind-blowing. Start at roughly 4 minutes 25 seconds to see the conversations with two virtual characters.

Microsoft, which invested $1 billion in OpenAI, has exclusive rights to the source code & commercial use of GPT-3, so this feature is unlikely to be added to Modbox itself. But this video demo is the best glimpse yet at the future of interactive characters. Future language models could change the very nature of game design and enable entirely new genres.

There is an uncomfortably long delay between asking a question and getting a response because GPT-3 and Replica are both cloud-based services. Future models running on-device may eliminate the delay. Google & Amazon already include custom chips in some smart home devices to cut the response delay for digital assistants.

Source: https://uploadvr.com/modbox-gpt3-ai-npc-demo/