LONDON, UK: ENGAGE XR Holdings Plc (AIM: EXR; Euronext Growth: EXR), a leading metaverse technology company, has successfully developed and demonstrated the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into its ENGAGE professional metaverse platform.

The engineering team at ENGAGE XR have used Open AI programmes, Chat GPT-3 and DALL.E to inhabit an avatar called Athena for real time conversations and interactions with humans.

Named after the Greek goddess associated with wisdom, handicraft, and practical reason, “Athena” is a fully interactive virtual employee who will take voice commands and complete tasks.

AI-powered avatars open many possibilities for enterprise clients of the Metaverse, including delivery of always-on customer service and the ability to build virtual worlds using nothing other than voice commands.

For ENGAGE Link users, Athena can provide advice, answer questions, source media for playback, create AI imagery, find 3D objects, create sticky notes, and interact with key functions of the platform. This is all done in an animated avatar body to give people who interact with Athena the sense they are speaking with a real person.  

The functionality of the AI means that Athena gets smarter the more she interacts with people, improving her performance and responding more naturally to conversational prompts.

Over the coming weeks, engineers at ENGAGE XR are adding more functionality and connectivity to Athena, utilising different AI programmes. She is also being given access to hundreds of technical documents training her to become an expert on the ENGAGE platform and tweaking her responses to become even more human.

ENGAGE XR plans to provide custom AI employees for its enterprise clients at a premium in the future. Each one will be tailored with a unique personality and will be provided all the technical knowledge they will need to support each individual company’s goals and tasks.

The avatars will be able to take on a host of client-facing tasks which include tech support, training, education, and moderation.

David Whelan, CEO, ENGAGE XR, said: “The creation of Athena is the beginning of an extensive development roadmap of AI applications for use in ENGAGE. These applications will place superpowers into the hands of our clients in terms of virtual world-building, on-the-fly creativity and professional client-facing services.

“Even at this very early stage of development, you can hold full conversations with Athena inside ENGAGE. For example, you can ask her to create unique art installations which are built in real-time. She can complete tasks such as fetching 3D models, videos based on your prompts and provide full tutorials and information on almost any topic you ask her. Athena is impressive and only gets better the more we interact with her.

“Deployment of cutting-edge technology like Athena is another step in delivering our vision for ENGAGE which is for it to become the dominant metaverse platform of choice for Fortune 500 companies.”