AI Services on the Forefront of Metaverse Enablement

The metaverse is transforming and facilitating human-to-human interaction, including human-to-machine, virtual interactions. 

However, models that power the metaverse rely on data and lots of it. 

Data is necessary for metaverse models to give more accurate responses, engage more empathetically, and become more evolved in natural language understanding (NLU) and in turn, human-level reasoning.     

This is where artificial intelligence (AI) comes in.  

AI technologies and services facilitate seamless data calculations and predictions to improve algorithms. It helps with tasks, such as natural language processing (NLP), translation, avatar creation, and world generation. 

Read on to learn more about the metaverse and how AI paves the way for its enablement. 

Understanding the Metaverse 

The exact definition of the metaverse is still up for debate because of how complex and vague the term and concept are right now.  

It’s because metaverse doesn’t refer to a single, specific technology type. Instead, the term is a broad shift in how humans interact with technology. Essentially, you can replace “the metaverse” with “cyberspace” in a sentence, and the meaning still holds 90% of the time.  

The Role of AI in Enabling the Metaverse 

AI services and technologies are the driving force behind the metaverse. It facilitates processes from creating avatars to data and language processing. 

Below are some of the metaverse aspects and processes where AI plays a critical role. 

Digital Humans 

Digital humans are three-dimensional (3D) chatbots that can respond and react to actions in a virtual reality (VR) world. They are usually non-playing characters (NPC) or VR game characters that act and respond based on an automated set of rules or a script, unlike characters controlled by players (or users).   

Digital humans are built purely using AI technology. They are crucial elements to the metaverse and range from NPCs to automated assistants within VR workplaces.  

Learning the Data 

Machine learning (ML) and AI allow metaverse models to learn the previous model’s output from the historical data and suggest new outputs based on those. The more data and human feedback the model ingests, the better the output each time.  

With ML, AI technology will eventually learn to perform tasks and provide the correct human-like output. Human intervention will become minimal, allowing for better scalability and continuous growth of the metaverse.  

Language Processing  

AI allows global users to interact freely. And AI can break down natural languages, including English, to transform them into machine-readable formats.  

Then, the AI technology analyzes the data, provides an output or response (converted back to English), and sends it to the user. All this happens on the spot, creating a real-life effect within metaverse interactions.  

Avatar Creation 

AI can analyze two-dimensional user images or 3D scans to create hyper-realistic, accurate avatars for players in the metaverse. 

The Growing Need for a Multilingual Metaverse 

Everything in the real world is currently occurring (or will happen) virtually in the metaverse. 

However, the real world is multicultural, human, and multilingual. It requires personalization, emotional engagement, and adaptation to linguistic, local, social, and cultural norms. 

For the metaverse to operate in a real-world environment, AI technologies must be applied and service providers used across multiple aspects. This includes from the hardware level and beyond.   

Below are several reasons multilingual capabilities, localization, and adaptation through AI are crucial for metaverse enablement. 

• The metaverse is generally a universal game designed for global users. It must have multilingual capabilities; from the game environment to subtitling and voice translations. Hardware augmented reality and VR also require multilingual capabilities and localization.  
• Users require multilingual options to personalize avatars, including teaching them to speak foreign languages. It only makes sense for the metaverse to have multilingual capabilities and localization for effective user identity personalization.
• The future (and current) metaverse landscape is bound to drive many merger and acquisition (M&A) activities, which will require legal document translations. AI enablement plays a critical role in M&A activities, which include machine translations of patents and contracts, AI-enabled e-discovery, and multilingual search and summarizations. 
• Like Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, the metaverse is bound to turn into interconnected apps and entities that were originally standalone and were engaged and integrated to interact with each other seamlessly. AI services and technologies can facilitate this interconnectedness and the necessary multilingual capabilities. 
• The metaverse will become a source of volumes of data through personalization and recommendation models. It will power personalization and recommendation engines to give players local options and recommendations in their language. 
• Emphatic AI and emotional quotient or emotional intelligence (EQ or EI) are crucial for humans to engage and interact in the metaverse the same way they would in real life. Emphatic AI is currently more of an aspiration than a reality (even more so in languages besides English). However, there’s plenty of room for services around developing and testing multilingual natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG) systems, including annotating data for said systems.  

For more information on Welocalize AI Services, contact the team here.