The need for virtual humans is "really important"

We recently reported on EA's Patrick Söderlund telling us at Gamescom that AI is the single biggest tech driver for our industry, but that's not all he believes, as there's another element that's important for gaming as well: virtual humans.

"With AI and advanced AI comes the need for real emotion, so we're spending a lot of cycles on virtual humans, and what does a virtual human look like and appear like in a game?," he said. "Because if you have intelligent AI with intelligent speech recognition and speech alteration, you can basically appear as Darth Vader in the game if you wanted to, and you can interact with other Artificial Intelligence players, NPCs, that can talk back to you, and you can have them have Luke Skywalker's voice, and you can sound like Darth Vader in the game, and you can actually have intelligent discussions with them."

"If you have, you know, I can start talking to my phone today, on Siri or whatever - if you use those systems today, they're pretty advanced, and they understand most of what you say. So if we put a system like that, and we make it better, into a game, together with a speak alteration and speech recognition software that's better than what's in there today, you can essentially have a dialogue in a computer that feels real. Not yet, but we'll get there. So that's why the need for virtual humans, and believable virtual humans, becomes really important. That sounds scary, but we need that."

Would you enjoy these types of conversations with virtual humans in video games?