Today, a San Francisco-based AI company has announced the launch of character.world, an AI engine that allows for the creation of ‘human-like’ characters with memories, personalities, and the ability to form relationships with users.
This technology is built on the Character Context Protocol (CCP), an open-source product from EGO AI, which allows for the seamless integration of powerful and authentic AI-powered NPCs across various games, apps, and platforms, including Discord and Twitch.
The announcement went hand-in-hand with the unveiling of almost $7 million in seed funding to further bolster these AI-driven creations entering the market.
‘Living, Persistent Characters Who Can Make Games Richer’
In a press release, the CEO of EGO, Vishnu Hari, explained:
Games and digital worlds have always struggled with flat, scripted non-player characters (NPCs) that feel mechanical and forgettable. EGO AI is tackling that head-on with characters who act, react and remember like real players.
Our mission is to move beyond chat windows and give people living, persistent characters who can make games richer, worlds more alive and interactions more meaningful.
In a short video presenting the abilities of EGO AI, the company showcased how a user can talk directly to an AI NPC powered by the CCP technology, getting an instant response that’s contextualized and makes sense. The AI NPC remembered the conversation and referred to it later, even recalling a topic when talking to the user outside the initial game.
Here’s the video:
These are very early days for EGO AI, but investors are excited about the potential. In a statement, Adam Draper of Boost VC, one of the investors in EGO AI, said:
What excites me about Ego is their approach to one of gaming’s biggest challenges: creating characters that truly feel alive.
Their foundation model is a breakthrough in AI character behavior. We’re entering a new era where AI characters will carry personality, memory, and emotion—indistinguishable from human players—and Ego is positioned to lead it. And Vish is the most resilient founder in the space.
In an extensive whitepaper, EGO AI explained everything that goes into the technology driving these AI characters and laid out the benefits, including:
- More authentic gameplay
- Automatic population of game worlds
- Automated play and balance testing
Each AI character will have a personality, needs, emotions, and memory features that enable them to feel as human as possible, and EGO AI has promised that this is the ground floor for this technology.
It obviously has some concerning elements circulating around it, the most critical of which is the inherent threat to human actors who would otherwise play these roles. This will likely fire up a debate when EGO AI becomes more public.
Are you eager to see more technology like this surface, or would you rather stick to traditional methods of portraying NPCs? Let me know on the Insider Gaming Discord server.
For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out the news that Assassin’s Creed Shadows might be coming to Switch 2 soon
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