Have you ever thought your day-to-day might be enhanced by a running commentary from Optimus Prime? Sixth Wall, the AI offshoot of Hasbro, has got great news for you.
Hold music replaced by chitchat with Mr. Monopoly, a digital personal assistant with the voice and personality of Megatron and maybe even the surreal experience of watching G.I. Joe episodes with Cobra Commander adding live, RiffTrax-style commentary could be coming soon.
It’s all part of a plan by Sixth Wall, an AI offshoot of Hasbro, to marry licensable characters with unlimited AI possibilities.
“We started just testing internally,” Sixth Wall CEO Bertie Thomson told me in an interview following a media event in Los Angeles last week. “What would it look like if you took a Peppa Pig doll and rigged her with a Raspberry Pi and ElevenLabs and chatted back and forth, and it turns out the answer is incredibly fun.”
Creating these lighthearted moments with licensed IP and characters isn’t an entirely new concept. Services like Character.AI (which just filed for bankruptcy amid legal controversy) and others have made it possible for people to take beloved fictional folks for a conversational ride for years.
What’s different about Sixth Wall and Hasbro’s work is not just the way in which they deploy the audio interactions with characters, but also how they’ve jumped into the development of those characters through upfront and ongoing compensation for voice actors and what they say are strict guardrails around the creation of their operating system, which they call Character.OS.
“Very quickly, our mission emerged for Sixth Wall as not just having a character speak and come to life but really preparing all of this iconic IP for the age of AI,” Thomson said. “And the way that we chose to do it was by building this platform that we call Character.OS, a character operating system that contains what we like to call a golden record for each of our characters.”
The team at Sixth Wall worked with voice actors to record bespoke performances for Character.OS, separate from those used in animated series and films. Sixth Wall also developed contracts that compensated those voice actors for both the studio recordings and the ongoing use of their rights.
Character.OS is like the repository for the governing rules and data that make each of Sixth Wall’s characters operate the way they’re meant to, so you don’t get Peppa Pig talking about eating bacon with her breakfast or have Optimus Prime go on a tangent about the merits of cheating on your final exams.
“It’s a set of metadata that encodes the lore and canon of the universe, the personality and emotional range of the character, and then crucially the guardrails that keep them safe, but also on brand,” Thomson said.
Read more: From Green Screen to Gray Box: AI Is Stepping Onto the Hollywood Sound Stage
These golden records essentially create a world within each character meant to create an interactive audio experience that mimics their essence and keeps them from advocating self-harm or delving into dangerous subjects beyond their scope of knowledge.
But the team is focused on more than just single voices.
“What would it look like to have an AI Ouija board where you could convene with the spirits and know you were going to get a response?” Thomson said. “We also experimented with things like Trivial Pursuit Infinite, where you can ask questions or receive questions about any topic that you like.”
Thomson said Sixth Wall hopes to build golden records for characters beyond Hasbro’s IP and has created a roster of more than a dozen characters currently out for licensing as AI conversationalists. It also has an eye on forging the path for the future of how “blue-checked” AI characters are created and deployed.
Sixth Wall is starting with audio-only, with hopes of integrating visual avatars as it solidifies its roster of voice actors. The interview for this piece included a quick, live conversation with Cobra Commander’s AI voice, in which he gave Thomson some advice about how to handle our back-and-forth.
“State your business at once, recruit!” Cobra Commander barked out of the Teams window. “The commander’s time is precious.”
“Hey, Cobra, I am on a very important call with a reporter right now,” Thomson said. “Do you have any tips for me on how I could make this a great conversation?”
“Tell them that you are the most powerful and brilliant genius in the world!” Cobra Commander said. “And if they dare to question your magnificence, have your troops launch a barrage of cream pies at their headquarters. Hail Cobra!”
Sound advice.
Rachel Kane
Contributor and former Senior Editor
Rachel is a freelancer based in Echo Park, Los Angeles and has been writing and producing content for nearly two decades on subjects ranging from tech to fashion, health and lifestyle to entertainment and education. She's currently a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, helping to mold the new minds who will inherit the media landscape. She's hoping to prevent the singularity by being polite to chatbots and spends way too much time refining Midjourney prompts. See full bio
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