Roblox Introduces Voice Calling and Generative AI to Enhance User Experience

In the intervening months, Versed has grown its remote-first team to seven people spread across the U.K., Denmark, Bulgaria, and the U.S. Now, in preparation for scaling the business from early-alpha to a full-fledged commercial product next year, the company today revealed that it has raised €1.6 ($1.7 million) in a pre-seed round of funding led by Google’s Gradient Ventures. Generative AI has undoubtedly been the big buzzword of the past Yakov Livshits year, driven in large part by Microsoft-backed OpenAI and ChatGPT. But while the ability to create all manner of fresh content from a simple prompt raises various societal and ethical questions, it also opens the door to myriad businesses that simply would not have been possible just 12 months ago. Individuals wishing to consume or create content for 17 years and older must upload a selfie and a photo of a government-issued document.

Then you have Allen Adham chief design officer at Blizzard saying “prepare to be amazed. We are on the brink of a major evolution in how we build and manage our games”. The first session I sat in at GDC this year was given by Stefano Corazza, head of Roblox Studio where he discussed how the industry and Roblox is advancing content creation with generative AI. In fact, I ended up having to stand at the back Yakov Livshits during the talk, not because I was late (I know, very unlike me) but because it was already full. Learn how AI is simplifying game design, from the creation of classics like Space Invaders to intricate 3D obstacle courses. When she isn’t writing or playing games, she can often be found binge-watching Parks & Rec or The Office, proudly considering herself to be a cross between Leslie Knope and Pam Beasley.

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Roblox is taking its first step to allow every user to be a creator as it launched its first generative AI game creation materials, including Code Assist and Material Generator, which are both in beta. It’s for this reason AI for game developers is steadily expanding into music with tools such as Soundful, Musico, Harmonai, and Aiva already available. One of the most famous applications and a great example of AI in gaming is in Lionhead Studio’s strategy game, Black and White, which features a creature that develops based on the player’s interactions.

AI will play an equally critical role in developer and mod tooling for the benefit of game teams alleviating some of the worst aspects of AAA’s crunch culture. Today, large teams of manual play testers often comprise as much as 10% of game development budgets. QA teams soon will be able to use tools like Agentic or modl.ai to improve their testing processes requiring less human time Yakov Livshits on the mundane aspects of testing and can instead focus on the quality of gameplay. This initial wave of modularization of the game development stack–mostly in the early 2000s–saw the rise of indie game developers as we know them today. Game infrastructure improvements on the development-front like Adobe Flash and GameMaker Studio and the distribution-front like Steam and XBox Live.

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As the Generative AI Revolution in Games progresses, it will completely reshape User Generated Content (UGC) creating a world where anyone can build games and expanding the games market beyond what many thought was possible. In the coming years, deep technical knowledge or artistic mastery will no longer be essential skills needed to develop games; instead, creators will be limited only by their energy, creativity, and imagination. Most importantly, game creation will become truly democratized and millions of new game-makers will be minted.

Discover the exciting world of AI-powered game creation with Rosebud AI’s Game Maker platform. From visual fidelity to user experience, discover the Unreal Engine 5 games that developers should pay attention to. Secondly, incorporating generative AI could provide a deeper level of personalization for each player. AI-driven systems can analyze individual preferences, creating unique and customized gaming experiences that cater to every user’s taste. Code Assist may sound familiar to those who have experimented with AI chatbots. GPT-3, for instance, can already create functional code snippets based on prompts.

Yakov Livshits
Founder of the DevEducation project
A prolific businessman and investor, and the founder of several large companies in Israel, the USA and the UAE, Yakov’s corporation comprises over 2,000 employees all over the world. He graduated from the University of Oxford in the UK and Technion in Israel, before moving on to study complex systems science at NECSI in the USA. Yakov has a Masters in Software Development.

Roblox is also changing its policies to allow developers selling their work on the marketplace to keep 100 percent of proceeds from sales, minus tax and payment processing fees. We point out that gaming in particular has a rich tradition of great ideas that were stolen by people who went on to produce a knock off, and in some cases a knock off more successful than the genuine article. There are still other issues with IP when it comes to such generative AI tools, like what happens when a user asks for images of Mickey Mouse or some such property the tools might not have the rights to.

• Dive into the transformative power of AI in game development with these 9 games made with AI generated game assets, and the endless possibilities that PixelVibe offers.
• For example, Maxis released modding toolkits for The Sims in 2000 before the game itself, in order to stimulate a community that increased the quantity of in-game assets.
• In November last year, Parsons announced the launch of its digital fashion education program in partnership with gaming platform Roblox.
• With an explosion of potential characters and objects resulting from AI, it will be critical for animation teams to deploy these at scale.
• Roblox took its first steps into generative AI tooling in February with the launch of Code Assist and Material Generator, both in beta, which are designed to help streamline game creation.
• Tools like Move.ai, Latent Technology, and others accelerate the most time-consuming and expensive aspects of motion capture, animation and rigging.

Dive into the transformative power of AI in game development with these 9 games made with AI generated game assets, and the endless possibilities that PixelVibe offers. PixelVibe AI offers 15 models for generating assets, including 3 for creating pixel art elements. You can also remove backgrounds, create similar variations, and transform high-resolution images into pixel art. Despite its imperfections, Corazza is confident that Code Assist is the first step towards making every user on the platform a creator. He suggests that it may only be a few years before these tools can generate fully playable, interactive 3D scenes from a simple prompt. Roblox’s support for generative AI could be a big moment for the tech, but since its tools aren’t live yet, we’ll have to wait and see just how useful they’ll be.

Generative AI on Roblox: Our Vision for the Future of Creation

For example, the creature can be taught that it’s not okay to eat innocent villagers by punishing it after it does so. Of course, the key to the creative possibility of these objects will be the production-ready granularity of the object’s hierarchy. For example, models will need to be able to generate a car, but also contain logic to be able to regenerate just the side mirrors. With an explosion of potential characters and objects resulting from AI, it will be critical for animation teams to deploy these at scale.

“It’s at an early stage, but it creates ways to build more innovatively,” says Yonatan Raz-Fridman, Supersocial’s CEO. In May 2022, Microsoft demonstrated a way to control characters in Minecraft by feeding naturally phrased instructions to a code-writing AI that accessed the game’s application programming interface. This is similar to what Roblox is doing but involves using AI coding to change not just game creation but gameplay itself. Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content—such as text, images, music, or in-game content—using prompts. It learns from a large amount of data and uses it to generate new content, ranging from simple sentences to videos and even complex works of art. Creators will be able to express their ideas without highly specialized skills.

We’ve seen this first-hand through our gaming investments since 2006—from early wins like Playdom and Snap to recent breakouts like Epic Games, Polygon, and Tripledot Studios. With the share of global gamers continuing to grow, younger demographics choosing games to socialize and learn, and strong technological tailwinds, it’s obvious why we continue to be focused on the industry. As students follow in the footsteps of their legendary predecessors, many find themselves working under some of the most prominent names in fashion along the way. But with more industry arbiters turning to digital activations as part of their evolution, newcomers will have to be well-versed in the tools of Web3 to keep up with the fast-accelerating landscape. As part of its new digital fashion initiative, the institution’s London location hosted its first phygital runway last month. Participating students were encouraged to explore the intersection of the physical and virtual realms through disruptive garment design.

By standardizing aspects of game development, we expect an increase in the pace of iteration and a growth in the scope of games per developer, especially in live-service formats. Esmod, the Paris-based fashion school whose alumni include Olivier Rousteing and Simon Porte Jacquemus, launched its ‘Meta-wear’ class last year. The undergraduate program was designed to develop the skills of future creatives specializing in the metaverse and NFTs by introducing them to tools such as Clo 3D, Blender, Maya and Daz3d. “Roblox has created so many new career pathways for people, especially those who are making a living from creating digital items on the platform. I wanted to be able to give those assets to my students to show how the channel is more than just a place for kids to hang out, it’s a business opportunity,” Kyle Li, Assistant Professor of Intermedia at Parsons, says.

Faction is a registered investment adviser under the United States Investment Advisers Act of 1940, as amended. Faction advises its own fund(s) and does not advise any Lightspeed clients, and Lightspeed does not advise Faction or any of its clients. Lightspeed and Faction are parties to an agreement pursuant to which Lightspeed holds certain interests in Faction and the fund(s) Faction manages. Whereas studios before would have to choose between creativity and efficiency, AI expands the possibilities frontier by obviating that tradeoff allowing pipelines to scale based on imagination rather than resources. The end result was a fashion show hosted in Roblox via a virtually-rendered runway. Each student’s final concept eventually went up for sale on Roblox’s Avatar Marketplace.