I once tried to write a visual novel. It was a simple concept. It'd take place in a single setting, a bar based on my quickly declining small fishing hometown. A student at a local university watching her future dry up, a bartender trying to deal with the ever decreasing amount of regulars.
The twist was going to be this: you'd write your own dialogue. Through some fancy machine-learning gimmicks, I'd replace the dialogue menus with natural, dynamic text. It'd simply match your input with the seemingly closest response in the story, and lead you down that path.
And here's the thing: it worked. The setup was a bit janky, and it took way too much processing power. But the core idea, that you could match user-written dialogue to responses seamlessly? It was already possible, even for a bored 16yr old with some programming knowledge.
And it didn't matter.
Because, see, I could never write enough responses that it'd actually feel seamless. I couldn't guess what the user would say. I wound up writing tens of responses for a single scene before I just gave up.
The tech for chatbots that don't make things up like ChatGPT or Bard is already here. It works really damn well. And it doesn't matter; because the amount of labor it requires is ridiculous even for the scale of the tech industry.
The problem was never about waiting for the tech: it was always about the work.
