Can we make so I can say something to an npc in sector chat or direct messages & it'll start a normal conversation?
Example - an Orion convoy
Me - /msg npc-1234 - hi! Where are you going?
npc-1234 -> hey there! I'm going to dau G11 to make a delivery. You want to come along?

Or perhaps, npc's start a random conversation with players.
A station guard at dau L10 to a UIT bounty hunter when player enters sector-
Station guard 1234 -> Hello sir. How's your day going? No hostiles seen in dau system since my last check.
Me to station guard 1234 - My day has been going well. Good to hear no enemies around.

That would make the game feel like npc's have some value.

I'd love to chat with corvus station guards while I'm sitting at station waiting for a friend to login or whatever.

Sort of +1 I guess
It seems like a lot of work (unless you copy a chatbot like chatGPT in for NPCs) for not much real utility. Maybe if you could accept certain missions (like escort missions) in flight via NPC-messaging or hire fighters/mercenary NPCs at wormhole sectors it'd be useful. But making NPCs capable of accounting for all the vagaries of human speech and holding a conversation...that seems better left to a chatbot.

I have no current preference regarding the op, but think it could be amusing. On a sort of related note a small amount of sector chatter between npc ships would be a little immersive. Perhaps they report on system chat if they are under attack by a player.

You do not need to make it account for the nuances of human speech. Missions that require you to tell NPC's specific things do not account for it. Either answer the NPC appropriately or it will be ignored.

Missions that require you to tell NPC's specific things do not account for it

Yes, that's with exact keywords (like applying to become a bounty hunter). I'm good with that. I think what the OP is referring to is an NPC actually holding a conversation, which would mean it should understand the nuances of human speech. You can't really hold an conversation when the chatbot has a limited number of fixed keywords and responses.

Yes it's supposed to make so we can chat with npc like you & I do

Yes it's supposed to make so we can chat with npc like you & I do

You're asking for fairly complex Natural Language Processing. In this age of Google and ChatGPT, that might seem "easy", but you have to understand that ChatGPT is backed by a giant supercomputer of GPUs in order to provide the kinds of results that they do.

Similarly, when you ask Amazon Alexa or Google to do something, some degree of recognition data is sent back to a supercomputing cluster for analysis. The little Alexa puck doesn't do much without an internet connection back to its brain.

Things like NVIDIA Riva provide this kind of functionality, but they are not free. We could plug into OpenAI, for that matter (the company behind ChatGPT), but that is also not intended to be a free service.

So, either we would need to:
- Build some kind of in-house natural language processing service, probably with an open-source solution, and train + host it on our own servers with GPGPU functionality.
- Or we would need to buy access to the service that did that for us.
- Or (possibly) we would need you to have a really fast GPU on your system (and spend that GPU performance doing language processing instead of playing the game).

At any rate, this is why MMORPGs have simple, fairly-fixed text responses with [Keywords] that you can use in a response to continue the conversation.

I've been keeping an eye on these kinds of options for a long time, and maybe we'll eventually do something (much as we do with limited speech-recognition and text-to-speech already), but I'm just clarifying why this is not necessarily trivial.

I seem to remember being able to hail the npc trader atlases and they'd say something like 'hi I'm hauling this from here to there' but only if you were admired with that faction. even something as basic as that would add some immersion to the game.