This seminar discussed tricks of the trade and methods that make patient characters that appear to be living. We will cover methods to achieve biological fidelity, interactivity, graphics and flow with the goal to introduce participants to techniques that deliver the appearance of active biology, a sense of urgency and responsiveness to game choices.

1. VIRTUAL PATIENTS
Important aspects for
lifelike characters:
Spoken Dialogue
Thomas B. Talbot, MD, MS, FAAP
Principal Medical Expert
Institute for Creative Technologies
University of Southern California
Talbot@ict.usc.edu
Associate Research Professor of Medical Education
Keck School of Medicine of USC
Serious Play Conf July 10th, 2018

5. LifeLike Virtual
Patients
• Graphical Appearance
• Scenario Design & Narrative
• Interactivity
– User Interface
– Scenario Logic
– Biological Fidelity
– Speech & Dialogue
• Assessment & Feedback

6. AGENDA
• Focus on interactive dialogue in games
• Conversational Simulations
• Dialogue agents and conversation design patterns
• Why this is important for games of the future…

15. Social Simulations

17. Dialogue Approaches
• Language Parser
• Simple Response
• Interactive Choice-Based Dialog
– Linear
– State Based
– Branching (Dialogue Tree)
• NLU AI Processing
– NLRA
– Goal

18. PARSER

19. Simple Response

22. Who ate the Doritos?

23. Choice-based Dialogue

24. Linear

25. Branching

26. Branching Judgment

27. Linear w/ Choices

28. Virtual Child Witness

29. Unlocker

30. NLRA CONVERSATIONS
• Natural Language Random Access
• Natural Language Understanding (NLU) AI Dependent
– Requires training language
– Probabilistic, not deterministic
• It is not possible to have a full scope human conversation
• Success depends on CONSTRAINTS
– Constrain domain: narrower means better performance
– Constrain initiative: exchanging initiative difficult
– Constrain scope: Go broad or deep, not both
• Lots of dialogue interaction patterns
• Possible to mix choice-based with NLRA

31. USC Standard Patient
NLRA
• 92%+ NLU Performance
• Voice Recognition decreases
NLU performance
• Strong Training Effect
• Time/Choice constraints on
users IMPROVES
performance
• People say weird things to
computers

34. Some things never change

35. Lessons & The Future
• Medical Interview Lessons
• Assessment Lessons
• Live Feedback
• Enhancers
– Dubbed audio, Scanned characters, custom taxonomy, etc…
• Mixing methodologies
• Perceptive
• MultiState Dialogue Agents (Physiology Construction Set)

36. 7/30/2018 (C)2017 Medical Mechanica 36

37. 7/30/2018 (C)2017 Medical Mechanica 37

38. GAME OVER