AI Hosts for Virtual Events: Guides Who Run the Expo Floor

A visitor joins a virtual expo, spawns in a silent lobby and spends five minutes hunting for a floor plan, a schedule or anyone who can say where the robotics talk is. With Neocortex that lobby has a host: an AI character who welcomes people, knows the agenda and every exhibitor, and sends visitors to the right hall from a single reply.

What it looks like

Gearwork Expo is an original browser trade fair for warehouse automation: a 3D venue with three halls, a main stage and forty exhibitor booths. Visitors arrive in a glass atrium where Juno, the expo host, stands by the welcome desk. She is warm, quick, and slightly too proud of the venue's coffee cart.

A logistics manager clicks on her and types a question. The visitor behind him holds the mic button and asks out loud instead. Juno handles both:

Visitor: Is there anything on picking robots for cold storage? Juno: Two things. Hall B has three booths on exactly that, and the "Grippers Below Zero" talk starts on the main stage in ten minutes. Want a seat? Visitor: Yes, take me there. Juno: Done. Sit near the front, the live demo gets messy.

Her last reply carries two actions: TELEPORT with the main stage as its target, and OPEN_TALK with the talk's ID. The venue fades out, drops the visitor into the auditorium and opens the stream panel. Juno never touched the camera. She only said what should happen, and the venue code did it.

Over in Hall B, a booth guide called Pell represents a small gripper startup. Pell knows that company's product sheets and nothing else, so he stays on topic, and when a visitor asks for a spec sheet he returns an action that opens the download panel. When the keynote is five minutes away, the venue sends an event to every host, and Juno starts mentioning it to everyone who walks in.

Nobody wrote a dialogue tree. The organisers uploaded the agenda and the exhibitor list, and the developer wired up a handful of actions.

How Neocortex makes it work

• AI characters. Juno and Pell are designed in the Neocortex visual node editor: personality, backstory, what they know, voice and the actions they may return. The organisers can chat with them in the browser dashboard before the venue is even built.
• Knowledge base. The agenda, floor plan and exhibitor list go in as PDF or TXT documents. Each booth guide gets its own files. Free includes 1 upload, Starter 5, Pro 20 and Team 100.
• Actions. TELEPORT and OPEN_TALK are Action nodes on the host. Each reply returns the action name and a target, several per reply if needed, and your venue code runs them.
• Interactables. Send the halls, stages and booths as metadata, each with an ID and a name. Juno can then refer to "the stage behind you" and target the right object instead of guessing.
• Events. "The keynote starts in five minutes" or "Hall C is at capacity" go in as events, so the host's advice follows what is happening in the venue right now.
• Session memory. Keep the returned sessionId per visitor. When they come back to the atrium after the talk, you resume the visitor's session and Juno asks how the demo went.
• Voices and speech-to-text. Every reply streams in the host's voice. Visitors can speak through the Unity WebGL microphone (it needs HTTPS) or through your app's own mic capture sent to Neocortex speech-to-text. A custom brand voice is one of 5 on Pro or 20 on Team.
• More than 20 languages. An international audience can ask in their own language and get the answer in it.
• Usage controls. Per-player and per-character limits keep one very curious visitor from using up the event budget, and the dashboard shows how much each host is used.

Ideas to build

The career fair. Every employer booth gets a recruiter guide whose knowledge base holds that company's open roles. A student in the lobby asks who hires junior game designers, and the host teleports them to the two booths that do. When a booth's interview slots fill up, an event tells the host to stop sending people there.

The launch lobby. A product reveal with a brand host who knows the press kit, answers early questions and counts down to the keynote as events arrive. When the stream goes live, the host returns an action that opens it for everyone still chatting in the lobby.

The conference help desk. Less glamorous and very useful: one character at a help desk who explains how to join the networking room, where last session's recordings live and how to book a meeting with a speaker. A short Conversation Flow walks first-time visitors through the basics, and each checkpoint comes back as a flowState keyword your UI uses to tick off a step.

The campus tour. A university builds its campus as a browser 3D world, and a student guide walks prospective students between buildings. The guide knows the courses from the prospectus, teleports the group to the library or the lab on request, and answers "what's the accommodation like?" from the documents the admissions team uploaded.

Building it

For a Unity venue built for WebGL, the Unity SDK handles the characters, voices and browser microphone. Venues built with any other web 3D stack call the Web API from their own code.

1. Collect the documents. Export the agenda, floor plan and exhibitor list as PDF or TXT. These are your host's knowledge base.
2. Create the host in the visual editor: personality, the uploaded documents, a voice, and Action nodes for TELEPORT and OPEN_TALK.
3. Test it in the dashboard with the questions visitors really ask, including the awkward ones like "is this talk recorded?"
4. Send the venue as metadata. Give each hall, stage and booth an ID and a name, so action targets match objects in your scene.
5. Run the actions in your venue code: move the visitor, open the talk, show the download panel. Keep the sessionId for each visitor.
6. Push events from the schedule a few minutes before each session starts, so hosts can point people at it.

Keep the knowledge base to what organisers would print in a programme, and replace the files whenever the agenda changes. A host who confidently sends people to a cancelled talk is worse than a sign on the wall.

Event hosts are one entry in our AI NPC, ambient AI and voice command use cases. For shopping, read AI guides for 3D web stores, and for always-on social spaces see AI residents for metaverse worlds. The virtual assistants page and the interactables docs cover the rest. Start with one host in one lobby and the agenda as a single file.

Checked October 2026.

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