Singularity Group Update #4

The past weeks have been super hot here in Germany, but despite summer temperatures and random downpours, our volunteers have been hard at work! What exactly they have been busy with will be covered in this post!

Mobile Minigames:

The Mobile Minigames team released a new patch, with the previously announced features and bug fixes. Players were happy with the changes and gave positive feedback.

Apart from reactions to the new patch, many technical game details and balancing questions are discussed in the Exclusive Discord. There, developers provide support, give advice on how to progress faster and address general inquiries within a few hours. The exclusive discord server has been growing to 35 VIP Members, who regularly chat and exchange tips among each other. You can find instructions on how to join the Exclusive Discord in the “Giving Works” building on the left side of your Mobile Minigames main menu!

Hot Reload:

Hot Reload for Unity was running wild the past month! Unity ran a Summer Sale on the Asset Store with 50% off until the end of August. During this time, Hot Reload was the most popular asset on sale, and even peaked at 1st place as top asset on the whole store!

Even outside the sale, Hot Reload is trending upwards and as more and more developers find out about it and try it out. It's especially interesting to see that the asset is being used by devs from many different countries - including overseas, as evident by the Japanese and Korean comments. The team continues to receive positive feedback and collected almost 50 Unity Asset Store reviews! Hot Reload support replies quickly to support inquiries and reviews and is happy to read about users' experiences. If you need help, you can reach them in the discord or contact them via email.

AI Livestreams:

Lots has happened on the AI front! AI technology continues to advance rapidly and among dozens of other innovations, Open AI allows fine tuning GPT 3.5 and custom instructions for Chat GPT.

While the industry trucks forward, the Singularity Group’s AI team hasn’t been sitting still either. Many changes have been made to our in-house models, with the Trump or Biden live stream certainly receiving the biggest one: a real physical studio!

The presidential debate got upgraded from simple video to a 3D studio, custom built in-house; including greenscreen background, lights, cut out figures for the presidents and ample space to physically walk around and interact with the embodied AI models while live! How it exactly works, what steps were involved to create it and behind-the-scenes pictures will be coming up in a separate post!

Apart from these real-life changes, the president's tech received 2 huge updates too. While the AI models could already react to messages in chat, they are now also able to react to videos and voice messages. Apart from react streams being a popular format on Twitch, they are a milestone towards the latest upgrades: Live Calling!

Live Calling is pretty much what the name implies - you can have an actual call with the AI model, meaning you talk in voice and they reply back with spoked voice. This requires no written input and just like with humans, the conversation format means the AI remembers what was talked about. All of this happens in real-time, meaning the AI will respond almost instantly - and in the future might even straight up interrupt you, if it wants to.

Both advancements were showcased on our livestreams, where viewers could call in via the Twitch Guest Star feature, and personally help test our upgrades. These were beta versions that still need some tweaking before the format can be used to run 24/7 streams. We’re actively working on these technical aspects, so stay tuned for upgraded live streams in the near future!

Other Projects:

Apart from our main endeavours mentioned above, our other projects continue to progress as well. For example, Long Covid Watch collected a good amount of research results so far and published them on their website. Anyone who suffers from Long Covid - or has loved ones who do - can read up on the supplements affected volunteers have tried and how they responded to them.

The Singularity Group Website itself also got a bunch of small updates - some of which you might have noticed already:

• The news page now features category filters so you can easily find posts you are interested in!
• These came with several new post types, such as the series about volunteering tasks, a different one introducing individual volunteers and other inspiration.
• More categories are planned, including explanations for our projects and behind the scenes content!