BEIJING, May 30 (TMTPOST) — Artificial intelligence company Xiaoice announced on Monday that it has established a game studio named ICEGamer, which will focus on developing AI-powered NPC (non-playable characters) with emotional capacity for video games.

The newly-founded game studio has attracted talents from Changyou, Perfect World, NetEase and Xiaoice’s core AI team.

The research and development project at the game studio has started successfully. The studio’s first open-world mobile game title will be based on an animation IP named AOTU from 7Doc. All NPCs in the game will be “AI beings” with emotional capacity.

Xiaoice’s exploration in the video game industry had already started in the “Microsoft Xiaoice” phase. After going independent, Xiaoice started to make more efforts in the game sector. Xiaoice has provided technical services for many game companies thanks to its XConversational AI, natural speech generation technology X-GAN, AI-generated singing voice model DNNV/XStudio and neural network rendering technology XNR. The company had partnered with Pokemon and developed interactive characters. The company’s Xiaoice framework had been used by companies like DMM to create NPCs for their video games.

Unlike traditional NPCs in video games whose actions are entirely scripted, AI being NPCs are interactive entities that are created and driven by Xiaoice’s AI framework, said Xiao Jiayue, the producer at ICEGamer. These AI being NPCs are diverse and sentient and have their own personality, according to Xiao. The AI being NPCs are expected to interact naturally with players in the forms of text, audio and visual.

“In conventional video games, codes grant NPC storylines and artistic value. In comparison, AI being NPCs do not follow a set route or repeat the same script over and over again. They will interact with the players. It is just like equal communication between people. These NPCs will have their own ‘consciousness’ and are not tasked with a specific purpose,” Xiao explained.

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