Artificial intelligence is an endlessly exciting and advancing field, and at the 2019 Game Developers Conference this March you'll have unique opportunities to study how AI is being used to push all sorts of boundaries in game design.

Notably, the GDC 2019 AI Summit is jam-packed with intriguing and in-depth sessions which offer you an inside look at key architectures and issues within successful games. Join top game AI programmers for panels and lectures, in addition to conversations, debates, and rants on how game AI can move forward.

While the summit is targeted at programmers who want in-depth discussions, anyone interested in what AI can offer the next generation of games will gain invaluable perspective and insight.

There are also loads of interesting AI-focused talks outside the Summit that you won't want to miss! For example, in "'Battlefield V' AI Dialogue" EA DICE's Simon Lindskog and Justin Langley  will cover the ideas and philosophies behind creating believable AI dialogue in a Battlefiled game set in World War II, as well as the process from recording to mastered content in Frostbite.

Making your AI characters sound believable and authentic is no mean feat, and together Langley and Lindskog will walk you through the implementation process, starting from the results of Battlefield 1 to a more evolved, flexible and easier system. This session will share a creative approach that combines both audio and programming skills, stretching the boundaries of Frostbite to support the creative design for the dialogue!

And in "Enhanced Immersivity: Using Speech Recognition for More Natural Player AI Interactions" you'll get fresh insight into how complementary AI tech can help your games feel more real and alive. In this talk, Square Enix AI engineer Gautier Boeda will show you how to build a speech recognition pipeline to promote further interactivity between the user and the agents.

You'll learn to make a voice recognition system, which supports multiple languages while allowing a large variety of phrasing. You'll also learn some methods to improve spatial representation based interactions. While the original application is for VR, it can be applied to any game where there is a need for more immersive and interactive AI agents!

Plus, Square Enix AI engineer Kazuko Manabe will be delivering an exciting talk at GDC 2019 all about "Balancing Nightmares: An AI Approach to Balance Games with Overwhelming Amounts of Data," in which she'll discuss a method that allowed Square Enix to balance a game with more than 10^100 choices of equipment items for battles.

Manabe will speak in detail about a genetic algorithm (GA) with a specific gene design that helped her team detect combinations that break game balance. In addition, she will present a data visualization method to find significant data from a large amount of log data that GA outputs. She will also explain a method to solve a problem that only appears in "player versus player", making comparisons to previous research about "player versus environment" that should help illuminate the subject for game makers at large.

Finally, catch "Ubisoft Club: Building "SAM", the First AI Chatbot for Gamers" to get an inside look at the nine months of development that went into Ubisoft's AI chatbot SAM. From the early prototype to the worldwide release of the beta version and the collaboration with game teams like Rainbow 6: Siege and Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. Ubisoft's Charles Huteau will share key lessons from the development team and the discoveries that were made from building an assistant AI which is radically different from traditional home assistants like Siri or Amazon's Alexa. It will also explore the future of the project and how an "open dev" philosophy brings community and users at the center of major development decisions.

Further details on these talks and many more are available now on the GDC 2019 Session Scheduler. There you can begin to lay out your GDC 2019, which takes place March 18th through the 22nd at the (newly renovated!) Moscone Center in San Francisco. 

Bring your team to GDC! Register a group of 10 or more and save 10 percent on conference passes. Learn more here.

For more details on GDC 2019 visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.

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