engaged in the adventure, the player probes the boundaries of knowledge and understanding of robots, and trades knowledge about humanity for robot information that will enable him to move on in the game. The player's mission evolves from finding the sensors to chasing the North Korean spy who has indeed infiltrated the island. The first part of the Bot Colony novel relates how KHT managed to infiltrate Bot Colony. Towards the game's conclusion, the player is instrumental in preventing the outbreak of global war. Gameplay The player communicates with the game by speaking into a microphone, and the game uses speech-to-text software to interpret and react to the spoken words. Before beginning the game, a player is usually required to build an acoustic profile and train speech-to-text, unless typing is preferred. The player will need to control robots, vehicles, or cranes to complete missions, and may advance the story by playing cards or trading in the Bazaar, discussing food with a robotic waiter in the restaurant, training robotic animals to do tricks on the kabuki stage, or investigating a crime against a robot in Old Nakagawa. To compensate for the freedom nature of the game, intelligent help is provided in the form of Miki-05 (the player's PDA) through a conversational interface. The player is forced to converse in order to advance in the game. North Side see this as an advance over some current state-of-the-art video games, in which the player chooses a pre-written selection from a dialogue tree. In Bot Colony the player can discover the story organically by querying characters about their environment and events they witnessed, guiding robots through complex tasks, negotiating transactions with robots and teaching them new concepts and new animations. These conversation-based interactions are mediated by speech-to-text and text-to-speech solutions integrated into the North Side dialogue pipeline as client and server side components. Development North Side Inc. started research on its natural language processing technology when it was founded in 2001, and at least initially, the business plan was to apply English to rapid scripting of simulations and scenarios. Bot Colony was first storyboarded in October 2007, when North Side decided that producing a video game was the best initial application of the company's natural language understanding and natural language generation technologies. The company invested in its own game engine, Anitron, as a test-bed for researching the integration of 3D graphics with language. As