Artificial intelligence has been a part of Talespin since day one but the company has been leaning more heavily into the technology in recent years including through internal AI-assisted workflows and a public-facing AI development toolkit. Now, Talepsin is announcing an AI lab “dedicated to responsible artificial intelligence (AI) innovation in the immersive learning space.”
“Immersive Learning Through the Application of AI”
AI isn’t the end of work – but it will change the kinds of work that we do. That’s the outlook that a number of experts take, including the team behind Talespin. They use AI to create virtual humans in simulations for teaching soft skills. In other words, they use AI to make humans more human – because those are the strengths that won’t be automated any time soon.
“What should we be doing to make ourselves more valuable as these things shift?” Talespin co-founder and CEO Kyle Jackson recently told ARPost.“It’s really about metacognition.”
Talespin has been using AI to create experiences internally since 2015, ramping up to the use of generative AI for experience creation in 2019. They recently made those AI creation tools publicly available in the CoPilot Designer 3.0 release earlier this year.
Now, a new division of the company – the Talespin AI Lab – is looking to accelerate immersive learning through AI by further developing avenues for continued platform innovation as well as offering consulting services for the use of generative AI. Within Talepsin, the lab consists of over 30 team members and department heads who will work with outside developers.
“The launch of Talespin AI Lab will ensure we’re bringing our customers and the industry at large the most innovative and impactful AI solutions when it comes to immersive learning,” Jackson said in a release shared with ARPost.
Platform Innovation
CoPilot Designer 3.0 is hardly outdated, but interactive samples of Talespin’s upcoming AI-powered APIs for realistic characters and assisted content writing can currently be requested through the lab with even more generative AI tools coming to the platform this fall.
In interviews and in prepared material, Talespin representatives have stated that working with AI has more than halved the production time for immersive training experiences over the past four years. They expect that change to continue at an even more rapid pace going forward.
“Not long ago creating an XR learning module took 5 months. With the use of generative AI tools, that same content will be created in less than 30 minutes by the end of this year,” Jackson wrote in a blog post. “Delivering the most powerful learning modality with this type of speed is a development that allows organizations to combat the largest workforce shift in history.”
While the team certainly deserves credit for that, the company credits working with clients, customers, and partners as having accelerated their learnings with the technology.
Generative AI Services
That brings in the other major job of the AI Lab – generative AI consulting services. Through these services, the AI Lab will share Talespin’s learnings on using generative AI to achieve learning outcomes.
“These services include facilitating workshops during which Talespin walks clients through processes and lessons learned through research and partnership with the world’s leading learning companies,” according to an email to ARPost.
Generative AI consulting services might sound redundant but understanding that generative AI exists and knowing how to use it to solve a problem are different things. Even when Talespin’s clients have access to AI tools, they work with the team at Talespin to get the most out of those tools.
“Our place flipped from needing to know the answer to needing to know the question,” Jackson said in summing up the continued need for human experts in the AI world.
Building a More Intelligent Future in the AI Lab
AI is at a position similar to that seen by XR in recent months and blockchain shortly before that. Its potential is so exciting, we can forget that its full realization is far from imminent.
As exciting as Talespin’s announcements are, Jackson’s blog post foresees adaptive learning and whole virtual worlds dreamed up in an instant. While these ambitions remain things of the future, initiatives like the AI Lab are bringing them ever closer.
