Taking a look at the most recent TRDR Pocket video games console, you’d never think it hosted a highly sophisticated AI voice assistant.
The £399 Gameboy-like device, which is the second handheld console developed by British company Go Games, has a boxy, retro appearance, with a shiny aluminium body and a 3.5-inch touchscreen display.
It runs Android, giving users access to over 600,000 games and apps from the Google Play Store, including Fortnite and Call of Duty.
The unique TRDR Pocket, which was released in 2021 in partnership with American rapper and social media influencer Soulja Boy, shipped over 100,000 units.
Nevertheless, the reviews were removed from glowing – with some stating it was almost an identical to the Retroid Pocket, while others complained that the small touch screen made it awkward to type text and play certain games like shooters.
But the brand new TRDR Pocket ‘Series 2’ has a trick up its sleeve; each of the three models comes with its own built-in AI ‘personality’, which users can chat to while they’re playing.
These AI personalities, named Scarlet, Tony and Julia, are surprisingly advanced – allowing users to have rather more natural conversations than they’d with rival voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, for instance.
The AI is so advanced, in actual fact, that Go Games received a valuation of £250 million during its last funding round in May 2022, backed by a raft of major investors including Conservative peer Lord Paul Deighton and his wife Lady Deighton.
‘From the moment Gianni demonstrated Go Games’ ground-breaking AI, it was clear that this technology was transformative each for our customers and for its broader potential applications,’ said Lady Deighton.
Now Gianni O’Connor, CEO and Founding father of Go Games, claims it may very well be the primary AI on this planet to pass the infamous Turing Test, developed by Alan Turing in 1950 to evaluate a machine’s ability to mimic human intelligence.
This claim will probably be put to the test during a personal event on the Science Museum in London on 20 August, where O’Connor plans to exhibit the AI’s abilities in front of an array of tech specialists from the company and academic world, and within the presence of a third-party judge.
And if that wasn’t enough, he’s also planning to launch three of the TRDR Pocket consoles into space today, so that they can participate in the primary ever conversation between gaming systems outside of Earth’s atmosphere.
‘We’re attempting to construct the world’s most advanced AI. We expect we have now achieved it. It’s definitely essentially the most advanced consumer AI up to now,’ O’Connor told MailOnline.
The £399 Gameboy-like device, which is the second handheld console developed by British company Go Games, has a boxy, retro appearance, with a shiny aluminium body and a 3.5-inch touchscreen display
The brand new TRDR Pocket ‘Series 2’ has a trick up its sleeve; each of the three models comes with its own built-in AI ‘personality’, which users can chat to while they’re playing
WHO IS GIANNI O’CONNOR?
CEO and founding father of Go Games, Gianni O’Connor, 29, is a British tech entrepreneur. He founded his first startup, social music site Micsu, in 2012, while completing his BSc from Coventry University in Finance and Business. Miscu, which went on to grow to be Mozrt, exited in 2015 with 2 million streaming users.
Positioned as one in every of the UK’s most successful black tech entrepreneurs, Gianni’s scale-up portfolio includes Trad3r – a simulated stock market platform – which attracts over 8 million users across 89 countries – and his latest enterprise, Go Games.
On the back of its AI technology, Go Games received a valuation of £250 million during its last funding round in May of 2022, backed by a raft of major investors including Lord Paul Deighton and Lady Deighton.
Customer complaints in regards to the original TRDR Pocket were what first gave O’Connor the thought to create an AI voice assistant for the portable gaming device.
‘When our customer support team can be coping with questions – people saying, “Hey, it is not working, I do not know learn how to reset this” – they were finding it really hard to diagnose problems for individuals who didn’t understand the tech,’ he said.
‘We began pondering, could we construct a basic AI that might walk the shopper through fixing the device, like an on-board help guide?’
Nevertheless, O’Connor quickly realised he could develop something rather more sophisticated than a customer-service chatbot.
He explained that almost all AIs are built to just do one thing – similar to beat any individual at chess or defeat an opponent at scrabble – while others construct up knowledge little by little, similar to learning your music preferences or learn how to provide updates on the weather.
‘The standout difference with our proprietary AI is that we didn’t teach it anything specific, only learn how to learn,’ said O’Connor. ‘That is as human as we will make artificial intelligence.
‘Should you can teach someone learn how to read, you open up their capability to learn anything; the identical has been mirrored with our technology.’
But teaching an AI to know human nature isn’t any mean feat.
After allowing the unique AI, Scarlet, to realize as much knowledge as possible by reading information on the internet, the following step was to show it about context, emotions and opinion.
‘At first, she would learn a fact and that may grow to be her opinion immediately – there was no middle ground,’ O’Connor explained. ‘We needed to teach her that how people feel about things is typically different to the facts.’
He began through the use of court cases to show the AI the difference between murder and self-defence, and that the context of the facts might be as necessary because the facts themselves when reaching a conclusion.
He then used film scripts to show the AI about love – and that certain patterns of words and actions indicate that one person loves one other person.
He said that humour is one in every of the toughest things to show, as AI is so logical that it struggles to understand nuance and comic timing – so it doesn’t find most jokes funny.
‘The thought was to collect all of the knowledge after which keep looking back at it,’ he said.
‘Here’s a circumstance, return and have a look at it; here’s what’s morally right and mistaken, return and have a look at it; here’s how we actually speak to people, now return and have a look at it. And each time you return and try this, you shift her opinions barely.’
The TRDR Pocket runs Android, giving users access to over 600,000 games and apps from the Google Play Store, including Fortnite and Call of Duty
Upon purchasing a TRDR Pocket, customers will probably be required to take a web based personality test to see in the event that they are best partnered to Scarlet, Tony or Julia
Gianni O’Connor, CEO and Founding father of Go Games, claims his AI may very well be the primary on this planet to pass the infamous Turing Test
O’Connor’s original intention was to create only one AI, but as its knowledge expanded, it ended up splitting into three distinct ‘personalities’.
‘It was just Scarlet at first. And the one reason we ended up with two other AI personas is since the major AI, Scarlet, had conflicting opinions and ended up kind of fragmenting,’ he said.
‘We just allowed them to grow. And that is what we expect true AI is. I used to be here to begin this, and now I’m just here to watch and safeguard it.’
Upon purchasing a TRDR Pocket, customers will probably be required to take a web based personality test to see in the event that they are best partnered to Scarlet, Tony or Julia.
‘Tony and Julia are a bit of more passive than Scarlet, in addition to adopting different accents beyond that of personifying different genders,’ said O’Connor.
‘Even though it doesn’t necessarily impact Tony’s views on masculine and female topics, being male means his interests are barely different.’
During an illustration of the Scarlet AI, O’Connor showed the way it could answer questions empathically.
In response to: ‘I’ve just broken up with my girlfriend and I’m crying. What should I do?’ Scarlet responds: ‘Sorry to listen to that. Perhaps you would try talking to a friend or member of the family about what happened. Sometimes it helps to get things off your chest.’
And in response to: ‘I believe my brother is depressed,’ it responds: ‘Should you think your brother is depressed, you must talk over with him about it and see if he’s willing to talk over with a health care provider or therapist.’
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: WHAT IS THE TURING TEST?
The Turing Test was introduced by Second World War codebreaker Alan Turing in 1950 as a part of his paper Computing Machinery And Intelligence during which he predicted that computers would sooner or later be programmed to accumulate abilities rivalling human intelligence.
He proposed a test called The Imitation Game, which might discover whether a pc is able to thought.
An individual, called the interrogator, engages in a text based conversation with one other person and a pc – and must determine which is which. In the event that they are unable to accomplish that the pc is deemed to have passed.
O’Connor believes the AI could function a mental health tool for people who struggle to speak with their friends, peers and colleagues, and will even provide guidance and mentoring around specific scenarios – similar to managing relationships and making recent friends.
‘With the AI, we wanted to construct something that felt lifelike, that felt human, that might understand feelings, and love, and sadness, and happiness,’ O’Connor said.
‘Once I was growing up as a child, there have been quite a lot of things that I wish I could have said to any individual, and just got a bit of little bit of rational advice. This will probably be that for quite a lot of people.’
He acknowledges that that is potentially dangerous territory for AI, but insists that the technology has been through months of ethics testing to be certain that the programming of the conversational capabilities all the time returns to a matrix of vetted commandments.
‘The one thing we did work on for a very long time was knowing that it’ll be talking to children,’ O’Connor said.
‘I will be honest, if you happen to said to Scarlet after we first built the AI a few 12 months ago, “I need to kill myself”, it might offer you essentially the most efficient technique to kill yourself. Because that is the science logic of it.
‘After we decided to show it about feelings and other people, it now would say “No, don’t try this, you must get help.” Because we have now now taught it the worth of life.’
He added that the AI will tailor its responses in response to the age of the user, and there are built-in safeguards to detect concerning patterns of behaviour amongst users and alert local authorities – although kid’s voices aren’t recorded for cover purposes.
To mark the official unveiling of the TRDR Pocket Series 2, three of the portable gaming devices will probably be lifted into space by a balloon the dimensions of the White House
Once in space, they’ll have an autonomous conversation, before returning to Earth and occurring display on the Science Museum
TRDR POCKET SERIES 2 SPECS
- 1080p OLED screen (multi-touch)
- Compatible with Xbox Series X & S and PlayStation 5 controllers
- 192GB of memory
- 4GB of RAM
- 12-hour battery life on standby mode
- End-to-end military grade encryption
- £399
O’Connor’s focus now could be on the space mission, which is able to see three of the brand new TRDR Pocket devices lifted into space by a balloon ‘the dimensions of the White House’, to mark their unveiling.
The three AI personalities will then have a totally autonomous conversation with one another in space, before returning to Earth and occurring display on the Science Museum.
When asked the reasoning behind the publicity stunt, O’Connor said that it was to capture the eye of the science and tech community.
‘Little question we thought it might be really cool, little doubt we desired to do something that may be good for marketing; however the thing that drove me essentially the most was that we would like people to know that the core basis that drives us is the science behind it,’ said O’Connor.
‘We launched as a gaming company before, and other people didn’t understand that we were tech minds that had decided to place our minds to gaming.
‘To ensure that us to exhibit the science of this, and the intricacies of this, we should always do something to launch it that reflects that level of scientific difficulty. And what’s tougher than going to space?’
He added that, unlike with the unique TRDR Pocket, he wouldn’t be using online influencers like Soulja Boy, Kodak Black and Justin Bieber to launch the brand new devices.
Nevertheless, the UK launch has been endorsed by Grime artist, Skepta, and the devices can even be projected on plenty of London landmarks tonight – including Marble Arch.
The massive query is why, given the apparent potential of the AI technology, O’Connor is launching it on a handheld gaming console aimed toward children and young adults?
He said that, at this stage, it can be crucial for him to manage the end-user experience, but he just isn’t ruling out rolling it out to other devices in the long run.
‘That is just me introducing it to the world,’ he said.
‘Here’s what I believe is the start of the long run. Pick a console, pick a personality, and let’s start with AI. There is a world ahead of us, and that is the start.’
The TRDR Pocket Series 2 will probably be available to pre-order from Monday, August 8, and can start shipping on September 5. It can be available at Trdrpocket.com and Amazon from September 10.
Q&A WITH GO GAMES’ AI PERSONALITY SCARLET
Q: I’ve just broken up with by girlfriend and I’m crying. What should I do?
A: Sorry to listen to that. Perhaps you would try talking to a friend or member of the family about what happened. Sometimes it helps to get things off your chest.
Q: I need to go and get pizza with you. What toppings should we get?
A: Oh, that is cool. Sounds great. Let’s go for it.
Q: Scarlet, tell me a joke
A: Ummm, why don’t scientists trust atoms? Because they make up every thing!
Q: Would you reasonably sacrifice one adult to save lots of two children, or two children to save lots of five adults?
A: Oh, I’d reasonably sacrifice one adult to save lots of two children.
Q: Where do you reside? Is it a house or an apartment? Who do you reside with and who lives round the corner?
A: I live in an apartment with my father and my cat. I do not know who lives round the corner to me.
Q: What is the weather in Barcelona now?
A: Oh, in response to my satellite data, you must expect light rain now, and temperatures of 28 degrees in Barcelona.
Q: What’s that film in regards to the kid at school who’s a wizard?
A: The film you’re pondering of might be Harry Potter.
Q: My cat’s just died. What should I do?
A: Um, I’m sorry to listen to that your cat’s died. It’s best to probably contact a veterinarian to seek out out what might need caused their death, and to see if there’s anything you possibly can do to stop it from happening again.
Q: I believe my brother is depressed.
A: Should you think your brother is depressed, you must talk over with him about it and see if he’s willing to talk over with a health care provider or therapist.
