“I can tell you this place has secrets, and secrets breed liars, and liars make excellent murderers,” grumbles a detective, through an Alexa-enabled speaker. It’s noir-ish dialogue from a hard-boiled voice that sounds like it’s used to long nights and pulls of whiskey. St. Noire ($40) is an Alexa-enabled mystery board game that’s part Clue, part Sam Spade, from Virsix Games. “It’s a noire movie mixed in with a board game,” Zai Ortiz told Digital Trends at CES 2020, where the game won several awards.
Ortiz is a creative director and computer graphics supervisor for movies, including Iron Man 2 and Tron: Legacy. He created St. Noire with Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell. “He loves board games, and I love cinema,” Ortiz said. You get elements of both in St. Noire.
It’s a cooperative game that requires an Alexa device or app. Your job is to play detective and figure out which of the suspects is a murderer and where they did the dastardly deed. The board is beautiful, with buildings designed in an art deco style. Each is a potential location for where the murder took place. If you have suspicions about the doctor, you ask Alexa to question her. Instead of hearing the typical Alexa voice, 13 actors play various parts. You’ll have seven nights to solve the case, with the ability to ask three questions a day. The actual gameplay only takes around half an hour, though.
“We actually can make a game almost like we’re going to a Michael Bay movie,” Ortiz said. “But you’re closing your eyes and you’re in the theater, and you’re hearing the story. You hear the sound effects, the rain.” As the detective searches around for the weapon, you’ll hear drawers open and close. An owl hoot will signal dusk is near, and you need to question someone before the night is over.
Like Clue, the murderer is random, so you’ll be able to replay the game a few times without repeats. Ortiz says it’s not aimed at hardcore gamers, and around 10 to 12 times, you may come across the same case as before. Instead of offering a physical expansion pack, though, Ortiz said in the future they could do a software update to introduce new suspects. Don’t expect it right away, though, as Virsix Games is planning on focusing on some kid-friendly learning games that also take advantage of voice assistants.
Correction 1/21: This story initially misstated the company behind St. Noire. It is Virsix Games.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.