North Side Unveils Bot Colony, The World's First Conversation Video Game at GDC
in San Francisco
MONTREAL, Mar. 23 /PRNewswire-AsiaNet/ --
North Side Inc., of Montreal, will unveil a prototype of its Bot Colony(TM)
NH). Bot Colony(TM) is the first game ever where the player can converse with the
characters in English. The language used is completely unrestricted: the player
simply speaks and the characters answer naturally using speech, asking questions,
seeking clarifications or offering comments in return. During this interaction,
the characters learn new concepts and facts from the player, and use them
immediately in the game.
The introduction of conversation technology into games should open up
gaming to people of wider demographics. The company hopes that Bot Colony
will appeal to both sexes, to a wider age group, and to people from different
cultures. Since in order to get through to the robots in Bot Colony one needs
to express himself very clearly, the game may help players improve their
English and analytical thinking.
Natural language understanding by computer is one of the formidable
technical problems that has remained unsolved until now. Achieving a natural,
intelligent dialogue between a person and a machine has been sometimes
referred to as passing the Turing Test. North Side has worked in this area
for 6 years, and though it does not claim that Bot Colony(TM) passes the
Turing Test yet, it believes that Bot Colony has overcome some major
obstacles in achieving a natural dialogue with machines.
North Side Inc.
North Side Inc. has been conducting R&D in natural language understanding
since 2002, with a first application in virtual crewmember training (team
trainers where some of the human trainees are absent, and are replaced by
intelligent agents who speak on their behalf). The decision to unveil this
technology through a videogame was made in 2007.
According to the company, the technology powering Bot Colony(TM) has
applications that go beyond gaming: it holds the key for a radically
different e-commerce experience, where a consumer will simply speak to
his/her computer to buy travel and banking products, seek information, or
access customer support. These applications are actually demonstrated in the
game: the player has to rent a hotel room, order food in a restaurant, or buy
consumer goods, all through normal conversation as if he/she was speaking
with another human.
Availability
The initial release of Bot Colony(TM) game is planned for the PC/Internet
platform. Bot Colony(TM) is an online game: the player's PC will run Anitron,
North Side's proprietary 3D game engine, Nuance speech-to-text and Neospeech
text-to-speech software. The servers running the language processing and
reasoning software run on multi-core computers with tens of giga-bytes of
memory each. The server massive hardware requirements limit the number of
players that can be accommodated simultaneously. A paid-up subscription will
be essential to add more servers and accommodate players beyond the
restricted Beta program. Registration for a free, restricted Beta program
will open at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
SOURCE: North Side Inc.
CONTACT: North Side Inc.
+1-514-935-4566
Fax +1-514-935-4047
press@northsideinc.com;
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