I get a lot of DMs on my X account from people pitching for coverage all the time. Sometimes one stands out more than the others, which piques my interest. I play games, I’m very interested in AI, as is Readwrite in general, so it’s easy to get bored with the number of companies that either say they’re using AI or say more than that.”We are not using AI!! How dare you?,
What if the game was AI? What if it was all largely AI, programmed by a human called Max – at least I think he’s a human, after an hour with Talk to Me Human I’m no longer sure because I was already so sure. Part of me thinks I was talking to Skynet.
Over at X we talked about our living spaces, gaming interests etc, as well as a game that Max created, Talk To Me Human – which has just come into Early Access and is aptly named “Talking Your Way Out Of It Simulator”!
Whether or not Max was an AI. I agreed to take a look as usual and dug a little deeper.
Talk to Me Human features a cast of AI NPCs that interact with you based on your reactions. They are all AI-driven and are your friends and allies in the game. You have “normal” conversations with them and you get points based on what you say – they basically mark your social skills.
Now when I say you have normal conversations with them, I mean ‘conversations’ – you speak into your microphone, the game translates your speech into text via the AI, and the AI assesses how you tackled the scenario. It’s all a little mind-blowing.
The game begins with your roommate telling you that your cat is lost, so you have to go to the pound, where you talk to your cat – actually talk to your mind – while it meows at you.
I won’t spoil the plot because you’re going to pay $5 to try it out immediately after reading this, but the tagline is “A game where you use your voice to get out of sticky situations,” and that’s a pretty accurate description of events! Max describes the game’s mechanics as follows:
- Encounter: Find yourself in unexpected, strange and humorous scenarios.
- Persuasion: lie, mislead, compliment, coerce – the options are endless. Say it out loud!
- Get the verdict: The AI decides whether you pass or fail. You can always try again!
The game is played entirely in your browser and suggests using Chrome instead of Edge when you start. I used Edge because I’m a rebel and once I gave it access to the microphone things worked pretty well.
Leaving the site and logging in again takes you back to where you left off, so you’ll never feel pressured to move on.
To fully understand what’s going on, since I have no doubt you still haven’t gotten any real clue from these words, I suggest you watch the trailer above to feel the flow. The voice “acting” is good and the characters are believable, even if they are a little robotic at times – I mean just think of Skyrim NPCs and then we’ll put that complaint in context. Apart from the subject matter, it’s all so, well, real.
Max told me that half of the levels in the EA version have been completed and the mechanics are largely the same as what will be included in the final game, so really we’re just waiting for additional scenarios.
He originally planned to have the game ready in three months, but “it’s been a year working on it and it’s (only) half done.”
A truly new gaming experience
By profession Max is a “natural language processing researcher”, a computer scientist with interests in gaming and AI. On your website He describes his journey so far as follows:
“I started an indie bootstrapped (self-funded) software studio. I’m calling it Least Significant Bit. My goal is to make great small pieces of software and sell them commercially. Kind of like a mom-and-pop software shop.
It could be a total failure. Then I’d find a normal job. But I knew I wanted to try, and I figured it was now or never. So it is now.
And, I recently launched my first product – a game! I think it’s a whole new kind of game. Of course, I’m biased. But it really feels like something new.”
And we’re after it, and what we’ve achieved so far is different than any “game” I’ve ever played in the decades of doing this work.
What we have here can be described as a social trainer in some ways. If you are someone who is not very comfortable talking to people, you can try it without fear of social anxiety. If you want to have a bit of fun by talking to robots and ‘humans’ you can do that too. Maybe try it once and become good at it!
The possibilities are endless, as long as the AI keeps behaving on its own. This is a brief first look at Talk to Me Human. We’ll talk to Max more about how it all works, how he put it together, and where it might ultimately lead.
For now, go check it out talktomehuman.com
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