Iconic introduces Digital Actor technology
July 14, 2026
Iconic has launched its new Digital Actor technology, designed to transform the way we interact with characters in immersive entertainment.
To showcase the technology, Iconic is also launching Pressure Point, an immersive experience in which players must use voice-control to save a failing submarine by talking an officer through an impossible decision. In Pressure Point, players speak directly to James, a Digital Actor-powered NPC, who listens, responds, and adapts to each conversation in real time.
Drawing on both the defined persona and the context of the unfolding narrative, Digital-Actor powered NPCs generate natural responses that always guide the player towards the defined conclusion of the experience, despite the unpredictability of how the player chooses to interact with them.
This approach relies on a combination of three AI models: the player’s speech is transcribed by an automated speech recognition model (ASR), a Large Language Model (LLM) decides how the scene should pivot within the narrative blueprint and crafts the next performance beat, and finally a new design of text-to-speech model (TTS) turns that beat into voice.
The LLM’s responses are directed by a custom orchestration layer that acts as a guardrail, maintaining immersion by ensuring responses stay relevant, consistent, and aligned with the experience.
Meanwhile, a custom, on-device TTS called a ContextualText-to-Speech (CTTS) model —designed for real-time dramatic performance— also ensures that the Digital Actor-powered characters don’t sound like chatbots, but have a cadence more in line with realistic human dialogue.
Speaking about the launch, CEO and co-founder of Iconic, Andrew Bowell said: “Immersive entertainment should feel truly responsive, with stories that adapt to players rather than forcing players to adapt to them. The launch of Iconic’s Digital Actor technology represents years of work to make that vision a reality, with Pressure Point demonstrating what’s possible when AI is utilised in immersive entertainment.”
Alexandre Moufarek, Director at Google DeepMind, added “Keeping a dynamic character strictly within the guardrails of a human-authored story, while leveraging the power of Gemma 4 to maintain the conversational fluidity and emotional nuance of a trained improv actor, is a massive technical and design challenge. But impressive technology isn’t enough; is it fun? That’s what actually matters. Creating digital actors that respect a writer’s intent while giving players unprecedented agency is going to be a foundational pillar for a new generation of interactive entertainment. Congratulations to the team at Iconic for pioneering this space.”
Wesley Kerr, Head of Technology Research at one of the largest games studios tested Pressure Point and said: “The natural-language conversation was really good. What stood out is that I could explore around the writing and have a real conversation in the space we were walking through together, rather than being dropped in front of an NPC and told to ‘go ahead and talk to it.’ About 99 per cent of these demos fail at exactly that, whereas Iconic actually brought me in and gave me something to talk about. I’m someone who normally finds talking to an NPC out loud awkward, and here I didn’t; it felt natural and easy.”
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