During this year's Game Developer's Conference (GDC 2024), Ubisoft has unveiled the product of a collaboration between itself, Inworld AI, and Nvidia's Audio2Face tech, demonstrating "Neo NPCs" capable of speaking directly to human players. This is made possible through the mighty, sometimes-terrifying, sometimes-quite-underwhelming power of generative AI, and is something we've been expecting to see since Inworld first popped up as an Xbox partner last year.
Interestingly, this actually isn't the first-ever example of interactable AI NPCs. An indie murder mystery game on Steam titled Vaudeville released on Early Access in June of 2023 and made significant waves for its litany of conversation-capable NPCs.
