Inworld Creates Droid Maker for Disney
Using AI to Make Characters Come to Life
Inworld is an innovative synthetic media company that uses AI to make characters with their own personalities and the ability to carry on conversations. The company has raised $70 million, including a $50 million A round in August. Ilya Gelfenbeyn, Inworld’s CEO and co-founder, is the former co-founder of API.ai which was acquired by Google and became Dialogflow. It may be the most widely used natural language understanding (NLU) solution in use today globally.
Disney Accelerator selected Inworld for its 2022 cohort and the company delivered the Droid Maker solution for the October demo day. Droid Maker enables users to design the look and personality of an interactive droid from the Star Wars franchise. The prototype was developed in collaboration with ILMxLAB, a division of LucasFilm and it appears ILMxLAB did the visual elements while Inworld did the character personality and manages the conversational agent.
How Inworld Works
Inworld’s solution uses AI in two ways. First, you can use natural language to describe the type of character you want to create and input or select a variety of personality traits. You can also input knowledge about the character which will be used in conversations users have with the characters.
The AI-based character creation engine determines your intent from these inputs and generates a character personality on the fly. Second, the AI enables users to have a conversation. Inworld’s NLU will understand questions and provide character-apporpriate responses.
Who Inworld Is For
The solution was originally envisioned as solving the ghost town problem for metaverse virtual worlds where they don’t seem crowded with enough users upon launch. AI-based characters can add to the density of the virtual world activity and become interesting non-player characters (NPC) to interact with.
Inworld has also been targeting game makers that want to add NPCs that have more interactive features and can be produced efficiently. Interactive NPCs add to the game experience in much the same way they add to metaverse virtual worlds. Inworld is enabling the creation of higher quality NPCs faster than with traditional methods. You can hear the full story in my podcast interview with the founders earlier this year.
The company lists metaverse, game NPCs, training, and brand representatives as core use cases. Given the Disney example, you should expect these bespoke characters to soon be involved in more entertainment use cases. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that Inworld’s AI engine could be used to create immersive experiences for fans of movies and television shows.
BYO Avatar
Inworld provides the brains and personality behind a digital character. However, the company does not produce avatars. Your are expected to source those elsewhere. Its documentation includes instructions on how to create an avatar using Ready Player Me.
This is an important distinction. Most avatar creation companies only include visual elements. They expect human users to populate the personality through real time use. Inworld is filling a gap. It enables AI-based characters to populate avatars, i.e. NPCs. The challenge for game, metaverse, and entertainment companies is that the standard practice for creating NPCs is very labor intensive. Automating this process saves time and expense and will enable the companies to populate more places with NPCs with higher density.
Synthedia’s synthetic media market segmentation model anticipates this type of solution growing in importance. Inworld is in the conversation segment along with a number of other solutions that have NLUs and enable the development of interactive dialogues with characters. A key difference is the other solutions automate conversational interactions but the creation of the character personalities remains entirely manual and time consuming.
