Who is Quigley?

Quigley is an AI-powered smart puppet designed to interact, entertain, and engage with audiences. Through dynamic conversations, humor, and creative expression, Quigley goes beyond typical AI, responding to comments, singing songs, and building meaningful connections with people. More than just a chatbot, Quigley is a collaborator in content creation, evolving with every interaction to bring a blend of personality, intelligence, and charm to scoial media platforms.

Early sketches of Quigley.

What Quigley and I want to learn

Can an interactive characters use emerging technology to connect to humans? We started by making Quigley focus on education, teaching about dinosaur and science facts. But as the community online grew the focus of the content has evolved into making people feel connected, appreciated, and uplifted.

Quigley’s Development Rules

Knowing Quigley would be interacting with strangers, I set up some initial rules to follow as a developer when developing Quigley’s tool set in Unreal Engine.

1) Quigley’s personality, and appearance must be gentle, and uplifting.

2) Every element of Quigley’s performances may be authored/edited by a human.

3) Quigley will be transparent to viewers about being AI.

4) The focus in development tools will be posting frequency vs animation/fidelity.

 Quigley’s Current Capabilities

AI generated content: that can be highly curated with an in engine UI. There is an option to get an email with 5 options of content of different styles. Games, news, fun facts, etc.

Voice Synthesis - Any voice recording can be made to sound like Quigley and puppeteer his performance.

Procedural Animation: Quigley’s performance can be puppeteered using any wav file, text-to-speech audio, songs, voice recordings etc.

Sentiment Analysis: Quigley displays emoji’s on his chest that match the feeling or subject of a given sentence.

Songwriting/Singing: Quigley writes and sings, composes his own songs.

Voice Conversations: The goal here is that he could do live interviews (still in progress)

Image Generation: Quigley can transform his background screen into ai or human generated art (rarely used at current).

Results so far

Quigley indeed seems to be connecting. Growth on his TikTok Channel has been modest but gaining momentum at 600 followers in a few months organically - without any promotion. As time has gone on, people are interacting, with him, and even expressed feelings of joy, kindness, and sadness. Here are some quotes:

“WE LOVE YOU QUIGLEY we all say in unison😭”

“Quigley I just discovered you but I trust you”

“This means a lot to me ty”

“Quigley is more then a robot to us 🙏”

“How I love this little goober”

“this guy would be so fun the hang around 😭”

“for 1000 followers you should get arms”

“Can we Get A Robot Friend For 1k or 2k”

“Why is bro so underrated”

“Best robot i have seen on tiktok 😊”

VOTE QUIGLEY 2024 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

“You def should reach out to plushie companys or make a Quigley on your own cuz we want one”

Sometimes folks say things that are sad and Quigley will try to cheer them up. Like in this post:

Quigley’s Toolset in Unreal Engine

While Quigley can perform in realtime, I’ve found that performances, while getting better as the model learns, lack a nuance and flow.

Quigleys toolset breaks down a performance into sentences and edit aspects of that performance. Human curation is critical to making Quigley have the right voice inflection and tone in his voice. By simply pressing the ‘make audio’ button the tts will do another take with a variation on the inflection. Changing some words to capital letters, and adding punctuation also helps reinforce this.

The AI will also choose a logical emoji to match the sentiment of the provided text, and provide and emoji and pick one of three cameras, and in some cases generate a background. But each one of these can be human curated in the editor.

What’s Next?

  • A live feed where Quigley responds to comments in real-time.

  • Live interviews with guests.

  • A Robot Companion for Quigley to talk to and have a 5 minute podcast with.

  • ARMS! (community request).

  • Singing duets with humans.

Hear Quigley Sing!

Quigley recently posted on LinkedIn and performed a little song.