Free your creativity

Bringing virtual characters to life

  • Breathe humanity into your creations
  • Software tools
  • Game authoring but not as you know it
  • Conversations that feel real
  • Beautifully designed UI
  • Where will your creativity take you?

Nurture your community

Safer communities for better engagement

  • Safeguard and protect your online spaces
  • Protection that promotes player engagement
  • Environment monitoring
  • Abuse incident investigation

About us

We breathe life into digital interactions

  • What we do
  • Digital Spirit
  • Innovative middleware
  • Our purpose
  • Who we are

Character Engine ™

Ally ™

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Unleash the power of character in your games – let players express themselves more deeply and be understood by responsive characters.

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Build characters who will improvise based on your narrative requirements and the player’s input.

Character Engine is an Authoring Tool and an SDK, which can be installed to easily to create digital characters, for games and beyond.

Create distinctive personalities who will show emotion and respond dynamically to the player – yet still hit the key beats of your story.

Players and users communicate naturally to characters through speech or text – and they understand and respond with the personality
and emotion of real people.

Auto-generated yet creatively sculpted conversations that feel real.

Endow your characters with dialogue that flows freely through speech and text. Our natural language processors understand players in context, enabling your characters to select the best response from their scripted lines or to auto-generate dialogue based on knowledge models of the world you give them.

The key components that power

Personality & Emotion

Your creative team can define personality & emotional traits in the Character Engine. Each character is given its own voice, script lines and an understanding of its world.

Natural Language vs. Dynamically Generated Menus

Players or users speak or type; Spirit AI recognises entities mentioned in the speech as well as emotional tone, question type and other factors.

Memory & Knowledge Retrieval

If the player has asked a question represented in the Character Engine’s data, it formulates a response dynamically based on that information – even answering comparative questions.

Social & Narrative Beats

The Character Engine also considers social context and what should come next in the story – whether that’s responding to a greeting or giving a gameplay hint.

Output generation

Once the Character Engine has identified all the information it needs, it assembles a response that reflects that information, as well as its own personality traits, emotional context and game state.

Voice output

Spoken output is rendered in the voice of the character.

1. Beautifully designed UI

Our Authoring Tool allows your creatives to author autonomous AI characters without any programming ability.

2. Knowledge Model

Characters maintain their own knowledge model about the world and how entities within the world relate to one another -- they can use this knowledge to talk about their world. As it is a structured database of information, the knowledge model can be updated on the fly if desired -- whether using new information that the player has provided, or from the game world, or from some other external source.

3. Story view

This is where the 'story space' can be defined -- the character operates and improvises from this story. This is not a linear script, but instead, the story view accounts for particular types of player input and provides variants of performances that the character may act upon, depending on context.

4. Multiple NPCs

Character Engine allows the player to talk to multiple different NPCs powered by our tools.

5. Gestures

Any non-verbal interactions from the user -- such as movement, gestures in VR or AR, or more, can be part of the NPCs social understanding. For example, perhaps standing too close to a character may make them nervous -- or perhaps greeting them without bowing may be understood as rude.

6. Sample performance fragment output

Testing tools make it easy to test individual lines, a scene or the whole story arc -- one such example is the 'regenerate' figure, which lets a writer test out their performance fragment variants.

Accessing analytics

Access analytics into areas of conversation that could be improved. Export training data for machine learning, so that writers can benefit from this technology without needing to be engineers.

8. Exporting and sandbox

Integrate Character Engine into your game engine of choice (Unity is supported) quickly and easily using our SDK. For writers, we also provide a Conversation Sandbox, a Unity project which can have Character Engine export files easily loaded and ready for natural language or dynamic-menu based interactions.

We know that immersive VR and AR needs immersive AI.

Studies by the Spirit team have shown that immersive interfaces can lead players to think of virtual characters more like real people. VR can be so immersive that players expect characters to behave naturalistically, and it breaks immersion when they don’t.

Character Engine empowers you to create truly meaningful story spaces & characters, in VR or otherwise. We free your creative voice – and your budget – enabling you to tell the stories you’ve always wanted to tell.

Developer Portal

Access our members-only developer portal here.

Developer Portal

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