Providing Computer Game Characters with Conversational Abilities

Abstract

Abstract. This paper presents the NICE fairy-tale game system, which enables adults and children to engage in conversation with animated characters in a 3D world. In this paper we argue that spoken dialogue technology have the potential to greatly enrichen the user's experience in future computer games. We also present some requirements that have to be fulfilled to successfully integrate spoken dialogue technology with a computer game application. Finally, we briefly describe an implemented system that has provided computer game characters with some conversational abilities that kids have interacted with in studies.

POSTECH Immersive English Study (POMY): Dialog-Based Language Learning Game

“…The Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) developed the Mission Rehearsal Exercise System, which is designed to teach critical decision-making skills to small-unit leaders in the U.S. Army [32]. Furthermore, the Natural Interactive Communication for Edutainment project developed a fairy-tale game that uses spoken conversation and gestures through a spoken dialog system [33]. The aforementioned work was developed for various purposes, including chatting, military training, and gaming.…”

Towards rich multimodal behavior in spoken dialogues with embodied agents

“…Museum setups have been a popular venue for multimodal dialogue systems in the past [6,7,8], this is due to that they attract visitors that are enthusiastic about developing technologies, they are forgiving in terms of the requirement on a stable functioning and task-oriented systems. On top of that, they also offer a sizable source for data collection of large number of naïve users.…”

“…Under these requirements, most systems arrive at design solutions to increase the reliability of the speech recogniser. For example, Pixie [6] used a push-to-talk button to get input from users, Max [7] used written text as input and speech only as output, and Ada and Grace [8] opted to use a human agent. This agent had experience speaking to the system but also knew what questions are supposed to be addressed to Ada and Grace, and how to ask them.…”

“…[6,7,8,9,10]), however, many design decisions have always been made to manoeuvre around the limitations of the different technologies (such as Automatic Speech Recognition through the use of keyboards for input) on the expense of restriction the naturalness of the interaction and as a result of that, increasing the gap from human-human dialogues. This design problem has always proven challenging and requires a sensitive balance between allowing the interaction to be accurate and meaningful, while making it fluent, engaging and natural so that users can exhibit affective signals similar to when they interact with humans, and would in turn respond to subtle nonverbal signals generated by the system in similar ways they would do when responding to these signals generated by a human.…”

Deal

“…Other research projects have used games as environment, for instance The NICE Fairy-tale Game System [10], where the player manipulates the game world through the helper character Cloddy Hans using voice. Similarly, Zubek [22] presents two examples of game dialogues; one where the player interacts with a shopkeeper, and one simulating a break-up of a relationship between the player and a virtual character.…”