After a typically bombastic teaser yesterday, Straight4 Studios chief Ian Bell has revealed the “complete game changing” unique feature for GTR Revival, and it’s safe to say it wasn’t exactly what we were expecting.
Stating that the studio had now applied for the patent for the feature mentioned in his earlier Tweets, Bell pulled the covers off the feature and linked to what appears to be a “not for public use” proof of concept video on the YT account of one of S4S’s employees.
The feature is described as an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-synthesized commentary team, and it’s pretty much what it says on the tin. Rather than employing human commentators reading out dozens of lines and playing them back when appropriate, this system would generate commentary on the fly.
In essence the idea is that when something happens on track, it generates a prompt which is sent to the AI. The AI writes lines appropriate to the situation, and sends the result to a voice synthesizer — and loops the copy to a second AI. That writes responsive lines, which are sent to a second voice synthesize, giving the impression of co-commentators talking to one another.
The proof of concept video above uses a demonstration race in Automobilista 2 as an example, with two AIs conversing in the voices of NASCAR commentators Mike Joy and Clint Bowyer. It’s certainly pretty convincing for the most part, though there’s clearly some scripting too in the video — and we’re not sure how happy the commentators would be having their voices faked…
In concept it sounds similar to ChatGPT — a chat bot that has been all over the mainstream press for its uncanny ability to create human-like text — but with two AI talking to each other within a specific context. It may even use Open AI’s open-source GPT-2 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer, second generation) or ChatGPT’s more up-to-date GPT-3.
However it’s far from the first time something like this has been proposed, with IBM showing off an AI commentary team for real-world soccer in 2019; we’ve previously seen something similar for virtual soccer, albeit with slightly more robotic voices. We’re not aware of anything coming to market with such a system though, and the use in a racing game would be novel.
It’s definitely something that would help immersion, but for now we’re not convinced it would qualify as a “complete game changer”. We’ll have to wait and see the final product, or something close to it — which doesn’t look likely to be before 2024.
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