Apparently an AI expert from Bungie studios, Damian Isla, doesn’t have high hopes for natural language processing.
He said it will not be based on natural language as that does not work. The solution is not known to him but may need to be a symbolic language.
If he’s correct that would certainly put a damper on immersive story. Canned dialogue or symbolic language can work, but lessen the level of immersion.
I wasn’t at the talk and maybe there is more to the story. Isla could be speaking just of the near future, in relation to the studio’s next release in the Halo series. Or perhaps he sees the problem with natural language processing really as a problem of containing player inputs. But that is more a design issue, not necessarily the fault of natural language AI technology. We encounter the same with immersive or interactive story - how expansive do you want the story to go based on what the player can say or do? If the player can say volcano, do you include a volcano? Do you at least need a response to when volcano is mentioned? Or do you just use a witty canned response?
I still have high hopes for natural language processing and think the shortcomings can be nullified by the a creative artist. Bungie is trying to make a game, one that already has a product history, their requirements are different than that of immersive story.
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