Bot Colony

MEGA UPDATE: New voice recognition, Achievements and more

With new speech recognition technology, Achievements, NLU improvements and more content in Arrival – this major upgrade is a real ‘game changer’...

Bot Colony

JULY 1, 2017

Patch: Good News and Bad News

Bad news first: our new speech recognition worked beautifully – but because of a misconfiguration with Microsoft Cognitive Services, it only worked for a very short period! We got over some hurdles with the configuration and just published a patch which will allow you to benefit from the more advanced technology, much more reliably...

JUNE 18, 2017

MEGA UPDATE: New voice recognition, Achievements and more

With new speech recognition technology, Achievements, NLU improvements and more content in Arrival – this major upgrade is a real ‘game changer’. Even if you’ve played Bot Colony before – it's worth playing it again. You'll find it plays very differently - it’s a totally new, smoother, more immersive experience!...

JUNE 15, 2017

New Microsoft voice recognition - a real game changer for Bot Colony

The Bot Colony update scheduled for June 19 will integrate Microsoft’s Cognitive Services Speech API, a new cloud-based speech recognition technology. Tests at North Side are showing this tech to have super high precision out of the gate, without training. We're keen to evaluate the impact of the new Microsoft technology on the game experience (it could be a real game changer...

APRIL 28, 2017

Checkpoints in Intruder - April 28 Upgrade

Since the game was relaunched on February 21, we worked hard to offer you a smoother game experience. The main feature in this version are checkpoints in Intruder. You no longer have to finish the investigation (2 hours) AND the object placement (1 -2 hours) in one session...

MARCH, 2017

Bot Colony Ask Me Anything (AMA)

We're North Side, creators of Bot Colony -- currently the only AI game where you can have real conversations with robots using our Natural Language Understanding tech. Ask Us Anything...

FEBRUARY, 2017

Bot Colony Videogame Leverages Advanced NLU Technology to Enable Players to Investigate Using their Own Words

North Side published a major update to Bot Colony the first videogame relying on sophisticated Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technology as its main gameplay mechanic. With interest in Natural Language Understanding, chatbots and AI peaking, a robot capable of sustaining intelligent conversation...

JUNE 19, 2017

Bot Colony Update Adds Voice Recognition, Achievements and More

Bot Colony leverages a technological breakthrough in Natural Language Understanding (NLU), a problem scientists have been trying to solve for many years. Natural Language Understanding is technical jargon for computer understanding of human language (English in the case of Bot Colony). The characters in Bot Colony understand what the player says...

JUNE 19, 2017

Preview: Bot Colony - A Cool Concept That Works Most of The Time

The concept of telling robots what to do using either a keyboard or microphone is cool, but for now, it's a bit rough around the edges...

APRIL 7, 2017

Premature Evaluation: Bot Colony

Bot Colony, according to its own boast, is “the first video game featuring intelligent conversation as its key gameplay feature”. You speak into a microphone and ask questions of the robot characters, or give them commands...

APRIL 15, 2017

Bot Colony – Review

It should come to no one’s surprise that robots will play a big role in the future, they already play a big part in automation today. But as humanity pushes forward robots need to become more sophisticated and more autonomous. That’s where A.I. Comes into the picture...

APRIL 8, 2017

This Is Not A Review: Bot Colony

Welcome to This Is Not A Review. In these articles we discuss general impressions, ideas and thoughts on any given game, but as the title implies, it’s not a review. Instead, it’s an exercise in offering a quick recommendation (or dismissal) after spending enough time...

MARCH 6, 2017

Bot Colony Preview: An Uneven Foray Into a Robotic Future

Bot Colony is not, as the name might suggest, about a group of sentient arses. Instead, this cybercentric adventure deals with the rise of artificial intelligence...

SEPTEMBER, 2015

Buy button is back

To all the fans that bought keys directly from myself, or bought the Bot Colony eBook on Amazon to get Steam keys, a big Thank You! We have assured Valve of our commitment to keep Bot Colony going (we did keep the servers going after all :), and the BUY button is back as of today. Your beloved Jimmy - and his cousin Kate - are now busy...

MARCH, 2015

Community support keeps Bot Colony active

After the Pulling the Plug announcement (Jan 28), we got lots of moral support from people saying the game must not die - plus $452 in Steam keys and $400 in eBook sales. This modest amount will enable us to keep going at least another month. Selling more Steam keys and eBooks is keyl to keeping the game alive...

FEBRUARY, 2015

What’s next and the Untold Story video

We're now making a last ditch effort to find a solution to keep the game going past March 15. Since Valve removed the BUY button from our page, we're now offering Bot Colony Steam keys directly to our fans: you can buy packs of 3, 5 or 10 Steam keys; you can get a Steam key for buying the Bot Colony eBook; we're offering...

JANUARY, 2015

Pulling the plug on Bot Colony

I am very sad to announce that we will have to shut down Bot Colony due to lack of sales. Bot Colony sales are so low we can't even cover the cost of the servers running the Natural Language Understanding software - which is $524 per month ( we don't even sell 2 units per day, which would enable us to keep the servers running). To give you some figures...

JANUARY, 2015

Major Update Launched Today (+ Episode 3 Prototype Video)

We’re happy to bring you a major update focused on what makes Bot Colony unique: language-based investigation. You now have a second mission in the Intruder episode: learn more about the family members and find out why the house was empty – by asking questions that will trigger Jimmy ‘s Robot’s Visual Memories (RVM’s). RVM’s are videos of significant events...

JULY, 2014

Text-to-animation Video

We'd appreciate your feedback on the text-to-animation idea described here (spoiler alert: Intruder will be much easier once you see this! BTW, this was done through speech, and it shows game performance with a trained profile isn't bad at all). In Bot Colony, you can command robots to do things. What if we made this available as a tool in which you could import your own characters...

JUNE, 2014

Bot Colony NLU technology – featured post in Gamasutra

For those interested in the more technical side of Bot Colony, today Gamasutra featured my blog post containing quite a bit of technical information about the game's innovative Natural Language Understanding pipeline. The material featured in the article is the meat of our next update (should be available in the next few days)...

JUNE, 2014

Twenty Questions free browser game available on www.botcolony.com

You can now play a game of Twenty Questions (20Q) with our Jimmy, the robot from the Intruder level. Differently from other Twenty Questions games where you just answer with Yes, No or Maybe, digressions and clarifications are supported. You can also ask Jimmy questions about his environment and so on. He will answer, but then he will gently bring you back to the game and expect...

JUNE, 2014

Now available on Steam Early Access – Bot Colony, 15% off!

Bot Colony is Now Available on Steam Early Access and is 15% off!* It’s 2021, and a devious spy has infiltrated the Pacific sanctuary of the Nakagawa...

JUNE, 2014

Robot Cognition Upgrade

Alpha 7 (Steam release) is around the corner with many upgrades. The most major one is related to robot cognition which will make robot cognition which will make robot reactions more realistic. We’re basically changing the way our robots get to know things. Previously, there was a fact base which contained general information about a robot’s environment, and some background story...

MAY, 2014

Upcoming Features for Intruder and Beyond

We’ve got some big and some small changes coming to the game play and to the general setting of the Intruder level. We’re looking forward to getting these additions fully integrated into the game, and we believe they’ll serve to enhance the Intruder experience. In this post, the new feature we’ll look at is Enactment, a sort of event-based video playback technology...

MAY, 2014

New Release Up! Bot Colony Alpha 5, Build 9.4.05

This latest release contains mostly under-the-hood improvements. While we have predominantly been focusing on stability improvements we do have a few new features implemented and some exciting things still on the way! This will be one of our last releases before our Early Access Steam release, so we’d like your help and feedback in getting Bot Colony polished...

FEBRUARY, 2014

Bot Colony and Her

The parallels between the recent movie Her and Bot Colony are interesting. Her is a great science fiction story, with Artificial Intelligence is so advanced that it can manipulate emotions with the same ease it can manipulate other data. Samantha is Theodore’s assistant, virtual girlfriend and psychotherapist rolled into one. After virtual sex...

JULY, 2013

Bot Colony on Steam

Bot Colony is now on Steam Greenlight. So far, there has been a lot of positive feedback and we’re exited to be almost ready to release our new game play trailer. If you have a steam account you should check us out and give us another yes vote. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=160542549...

JULY, 2013

Bot Colony Alpha Update

We finally pushed out the second wave of our closed Alpha on July 9th. Players are getting their first chance to talk with Jimmy (our robot AI). We are still looking for additional Alpha players to test our language based game play and are accepting registration for the next wave by e-mail. If you would like to join the ranks of our alpha players you can e-mail...

MARCH, 2013

Bot Colony and the Turing Test

“Just ask Jimmy [North Side's robot] if Ayame [North Side's nominal adult human] can put her little finger all the way up her nose.” This line concludes Robert French’s reaction to my letter (which was in reaction to his article Moving Beyond the Turing Test in Dec. 2012). My letter and his reaction to it were published in the respected...

JANUARY, 2013

What happened in the last two years

We surfaced back after two and half years of silence. So what happened in that time? Here’s some North Side and Bot Colony lore for those who don’t know the company and...