Niantic’s AR Pets ‘Peridot’ Gain Voice Capabilities Through Hume AI Partnership
San Francisco, CA – Today, Niantic Spatial announced that its augmented reality (AR) companions, known as Dots from the game Peridot, can now speak, powered by technology from Hume AI.
The new voice functionality, initially revealed in September, is now available for public demonstration at Snap’s Lens Fest developer event this week and is enabled through Snap’s Spectacles augmented reality smart glasses. Peridot, which began as a mobile game in 2022, allows users to customize and interact with digital, dog-sized creatures that appear to inhabit the real world through their smartphone cameras. Niantic Spatial, a startup formed in April, is focused on building AR experiences using geospatial data.
Hume AI, a company specializing in empathetic chatbot technology, provides the large language model that gives the Dots their voice. This integration extends Niantic’s vision of blending the digital and physical worlds, offering a more immersive AR experience. This development represents a significant step toward more realistic and engaging interactions within augmented reality environments.
The ability for AR creatures to communicate verbally could revolutionize how users interact with digital content overlaid onto their surroundings. Niantic Spatial plans to continue expanding the capabilities of Peridot Beyond, aiming to create a platform for developers to build and share AR experiences. More information about Niantic’s AR initiatives can be found on their official website, and details on Hume AI’s technology are available here.
Officials stated that further updates and expanded access to the voice-enabled Peridot experience will be rolled out in the coming months.
Imagine you’re walking your dog. It interacts with the world around you—sniffing some things, relieving itself on others. You walk down the Embarcadero in San Francisco on a bright sunny day, and you see the Ferry Building in the distance as you look out into the bay. Your dog turns to you, looks you in the eye, and says, “Did you know this waterfront was blocked by piers and a freeway for 100 years?”
OK now imagine your dog looks like an alien and only you can see it. That’s the vision for a new capability created for the Niantic Labs AR experience Peridot.
Niantic, also the developer of the worldwide AR behemoth Pokémon Go, hopes to build out its vision of extending the metaverse into the real world by giving people the means to augment the space around them with digital artifacts. Peridot is a mobile game that lets users customize and interact with their own little Dots—dog-sized digital companions that appear on your phone’s screen and can look like they’re interacting with the world objects in the view of your camera lens. They’re very cute, and yes, they look a lot like Pokémon. Now, they can talk.
Peridot started as a mobile game in 2022, then got infused with generative AI features. The game has since moved into the hands of Niantic Spatial, a startup created in April that aims to turn geospatial data into an accessible playground for its AR ambitions. Now called Peridot Beyond, it has been enabled in Snap’s Spectacles.
Hume AI, a startup running a large language model that aims to make chatbots seem more empathetic, is now partnering with Niantic Spatial to bring a voice to the Dots on Snap’s Spectacles. The move was initially announced in September, but now it’s ready for the public and will be demonstrated at Snap’s Lens Fest developer event this week.
