Microsoft’s Xbox wants to help game developers harness the power of generative AI. The company has entered into a multi-year partnership with Inworld AI to build automation tools for creating game dialogue and narrative tools at scale. Inworld has expertise in working with generative AI models for character development while Microsoft will contribute cloud solutions including Azure OpenAI Service and the technical insights of Microsoft Research on the future of play. The Xbox division will oversee the initiative as part of its ongoing effort to bring responsible creator tools to its developers.

VentureBeat describes the partnership as “a quest to deliver an accessible, responsibly designed multi-platform AI toolset” to Xbox developers, “assisting and empowering creators in dialogue, story, and quest design.”

Founded in 2021 by former Google AI developers Ilya Gelfenbeyn, Michael Ermolenko and Kylan Gibbs, Inworld’s Character Engine has since been used by content development teams at Niantic, LG and Samsung to create and deploy AI-powered characters in games and interactive media. Inworld AI has raised $125 million in VC funding from companies including Kleiner Perkins, Intel Capital and Meta Ventures for a valuation exceeding $500 million.

Per a Microsoft game dev blog post, the initial Xbox toolset will include:

• An AI design copilot that assists and empowers game designers to explore more creative ideas, turning prompts into detailed scripts, dialogue trees, quests and more.
• An AI character runtime engine that can be integrated into the game client, enabling entirely new narratives with dynamically-generated stories, quests, and dialogue for players to experience.

“We will collaborate and innovate with game creators inside Xbox studios as well as third-party studios as we develop the tools that meet their needs and inspire new possibilities for future games,” Xbox General Manager of Gaming AI Haiyan Zhang writes in her blog post.

Inworld has been working on AI NPCs [non-player characters] that react to questions from a player, much like how ChatGPT or Bing Chat responds to natural language queries,” The Verge explains, adding that the GenAI NPCs “can respond in unique voices and can include complex dialogue trees or personalized dynamic storylines within a game.”

Related:
Microsoft Will Let Xbox Game Makers Use AI Tools for Story Design and NPCs, Engadget, 11/7/23
Xbox Moderation Team Turns to AI for Help Filtering a Flood of User Content, Ars Technica, 11/7/23