Looking to pay for the creation of an animesh character

[Tethysia]

I'm not sure the correct term for what I'm looking for.  Animesh character? that's not stiff with a simple loop animation.  I'm looking to create a mystical oracle for an ancient role play sim. 
This creature would be spectral? (see through or misty) and would engage the visitor in conversation where the visitor would ask a question and get an answer.  Not sure if the animesh creater is also the one to give the character personality or if that's the job of the scripter.  Maybe they're the same person?

What is a price range for such a thing?

Thanks

Myklos Tethysia

 

[Bonadea Avedon]

this is possible but it will be pricey do you have a budget on how much you are able to pay?

[animats]

Quote

"This creature ... would engage the visitor in conversation where the visitor would ask a question and get an answer. "

I've been doing some work on that. I'm looking into bolting the Rasa system onto Second Life. But I'm months away from having anything useful.

Rasa is intended for customer-support chatbots. It's open source, and it may be possible to bash it into being an NPC engine. I loaded the GTFO frequently asked questions list into it, and it gives you back the most relevant answer for whatever question you ask. It's good at matching sentences to ones with the same meaning, and uses machine learning techniques to do it. But I only have about 20 Q and As to work with, so if you ask something not covered, you get a mostly bogus answer. It knows it doesn't have a good match, and can be set to respond with something like "I don't understand". This sort of thing needs hundreds of examples to work well, and someone has to monitor its errors for the first few thousand requests to train it. So it needs infrastructure and a staff to feed it data.

This sort of thing is intended for a business faced with hundreds of thousands or millions of support requests every day, and wants to handle 99% of them automatically, while diverting the hard cases to a call center. So you have lots of text to work with. For a NPC that gets a few users a day, it's going to take a long time to get enough interactions to train the system. It's overkill for Second Life, but interesting to work on during lockdown.

If you have some good question and answer sets, let me have a copy and I'll play with them a bit. Best to have three or four ways of stating each question,  and about a hundred answers. Then there's enough data for the machine learning system to get started.