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Good morning, human brains, and welcome back to your daily munch of AI news.

Here’s what’s on the menu today:

• We want AI NPCs, and we want them now 👨‍💻 👾

  Inworld says 75% of developers are eager for AI NPCs in games.

• Automatically add sound effects to your videos 🔊 😌

  Pika Labs launched a new tool that generates sounds for AI videos.

• Create a realistic clone of your voice 👄 🗯️

  Microsoft launched a text-to-speech tool called NaturalSpeech 3.

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MAIN COURSE

Gamer nerds, rejoice 👨‍💻 👾

On Saturday, Inworld AI, a gaming startup, published a survey of 524 developers. The results show that most developers are excited to integrate AI NPCs into video games.

What did the survey reveal?

About 75% of developers are excited to incorporate AI NPCs (non-playable characters) to enhance gameplay, replayability, player engagement, and more.

What games?

Sandbox, sims, RPGs, and open-world games are expected to widely adopt them. Virtually every video game could become more engaging and immersive with AI NPCs.

Why are AI NPCs so great?

They have the potential to create more lifelike interactions, deeper emotional connections, customizable narratives, higher-quality expressions and gestures, and more.

Better games… So what?

More than half of developers believe AI NPCs will generate over 40% ROI through NPC subscriptions, season passes, side quests, and more. The study suggests that over 40% of studios will adopt AI NPCs in the next five years.

Wow. How else has AI impacted gaming?

Back in August, we reported on Inworld’s $500 million valuation. Nasdaq gave it a billboard slot for the “best-funded AI and games startup.”

In September, we covered Call of Duty’s AI overhaul. Activision and Modulate created “ToxMod” to combat chat toxicity in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III.

In November, we reported on Microsoft and Inworld’s partnership. The goal was to equip developers with AI for creating dialogues, narratives, and characters.

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SIDE SALAD

Instant sound effects for your videos 🔊 😌

On Saturday, Pika Labs announced a new sound effects feature. It allows you to generate sound effects from text prompts for generative AI videos.

What does it do?

It creates sound effects for your AI videos like bacon crackling, car engine noise, frog croaks, and more. The goal is to enable the creation of fully formed AI films with effects, sounds, and narrative consistency.

How can I use it?

You have to be a Pro Plan subscriber or higher to use it now. Pika Labs claims it intends to roll it out more widely in the coming weeks.

Is it any good?

Eh. Early users reported mismatched timing between sound and video actions, inaccurate generations, and more issues.

RECOMMENDED READING

If you’re building a startup, then we recommend reading Jason Cohen’s newsletter A Smart Bear. Jason has built two unicorn companies and invested in dozens of startups. Subscribe and join 47,000+ free readers.

A LITTLE SOMETHING EXTRA

Believable text-to-speech 👄 🗯️

Last week, Microsoft launched NaturalSpeech 3. It’s a text-to-speech model that can clone voices, emulate realistic emotions, and more.

What does it do?

It allows you to manipulate speech attributes to create voices with emotions like anger, fear, or surprise. It breaks down speech into subunits like content, timbre, and acoustic details.

Is it any good?

It claims to outperform existing text-to-speech systems in quality, similarity, intelligibility, and more.

Sweet, how can I use it?

You can’t. Microsoft didn’t release it for public use due to alleged security concerns.

YOUR DAILY MUNCH

Tools

Vital — creates customized meditations from a text prompt.

Firebender — a B2B lead automation tool to find quality leads.

Shop That Look — upload an image of an outfit and find similar items to buy.

Botika — generates fashion product images with AI models.

Think Pieces

Is AI better at prompt engineering than humans? Research from VMware shows the AI performs better when it has control over its own prompts.

How good will Siri be this year? Siri’s Co-creator claims it will “become a real force in the AI arena.”

Is this really the first AI-discovered drug? Insilico Medicine, a biotech startup, announced it is now in Phase II clinical trials.

Startup News

Elon Musk announced that xAI’s Grok will be open source. He claims this will take place later this week.

NVIDIA is reportedly discontinuing its GTX GPUs. It will shift its focus to its TRX gaming graphics cards.

Google’s Pixel 9 smartphones will contain the Tensor 4 chip. It will reportedly offer improved heat and power management.

Research

Griffin — a model that is trained on fewer tokens than Llama-2, but matches its performance.

VisionLLaMA — a unified vision transformer framework that leverages the success of LLaMA, BLOOM, and more vision models.

AtP* — A method to link specific behaviors in LLMs to individual components.

MEMES FOR DESSERT

TWEET OF THE DAY

As AI models become more advanced, current benchmarks and intelligence evaluations become more obsolete. Here’s an interesting take on how to measure an AI’s creative capacity.

Tag us on Twitter @BotEatBrain for a chance to be featured here tomorrow.

AI ART-SHOW

Until next time 🤖😋🧠