Show HN: Voice driven murder mystery, Interview AI suspects with your voice
Hey HN! I'm excited to show off this really fun project I put together. I originally built this project 2-3 years ago, AI was already booming at the time, however voice AI agents were still very early. I loved my proof of concept at the time, but wasn't quite happy with it. I recently had the desire to check out the tech again, and know many of you will be interested. Interviews are speech to speech with OpenAI's gpt-realtime-2.1 over WebRTC. This model is... expensive, and because of that, I have to add some amount of restrictions, conversations are tied to a authenticated Clerk user id. I have also added a 30 minute timer because well, I really don't want to go broke while I sleep tonight. Each suspect has a tool they call when you make a direct accusation. It captures who you accused and a faithful list of the evidence you actually stated. A separate gpt-5-mini judge then decides which of the case's required evidence facts you genuinely presented. Paraphrasing counts, vague suspicion and fishing don't. The rest is Next.js, MongoDB, and Clerk. Let me know whether the suspects hold up under a real interrogation.
Discussion Highlights (20 comments)
lorenzo95
sounds neat, would love to try it but I don't make accounts for websites anymore.
wewewedxfgdf
I have no problem with AI generated text and story but I just can't stand AI voices. Even a hint it is AI narrated and I check out. I would encourage you to consider getting it voice narrated by real people. I'd rather listen to bad/amateur human narration than AI voices. As a second point - this is very interesting using voice control as game input are there viable alternatives for realtime voice uasing your own GPU?
londons_explore
It was working great... But now it says it can't connect. Did the server go down or did I hit one of your limits?
bartleeanderson
sounds good, but it won't get past Dispatch confirmation. You should specify what networking permissions or whatever is needed. My It goes red and the text to read disappears.
garbagewoman
"voice connection failed"
b800h
Even the tag-line, "one poisoned patriarch, one locked-in truth" sounds very AI, and makes me think that I'd struggle to enjoy this. But I'll give it a go, because the idea is excellent. I think this would work very very well in combination with human writers.
grahamburger
Neat! I've been wanting to make something like this for a long time, well before LLMs came around. It was one of the first things I tried out with an LLM in the early days of ChatGPT. My son and I made little mysteries for each other and just pasted them in a chatgpt conversation with instructions for it to pretend to be the other characters and whatnot, then handed the keyboard to the player. Mine didn't work that well, I don't think he ever solved it; partially because chatgpt kinda led him astray. When I started his, I just point blank asked the mystery and it told me the solution. I felt bad about that, he had put a good amount of effort into it, but I had reminded him to tell it not to reveal the answer and he didn't. Anyway, I figured someone would make this eventually! Excited to give it a try!
donpdonp
even without trying it, its so cool this exists. I think this kind of voice interaction has been a dream of adventure game creators for so long, and now its possible. there was a game many years ago (in the days of messengers like trillium being popular), I forget the name, where one of the characters would make a landline phone call to you. The voice acting was great and it felt novel and exciting to see it work.
ethannam9022
This is a really fun take on a detective game. One small thing I noticed: during the initial detective briefing, the time always seems to show 0:00. Not sure if that’s intentional or a bug.
ShinyLeftPad
Good way to get more people's voices into training dataset
wfvr
Congrats, I have not had the chance to try it yet, but what I saw looked awesome and I'll give it a go, for sure. I'll update this comment when I do. I've been working on a similar concept for 6 months now ( https://game.selna.ai , portuguese only for now, sorry!), and it's been a journey. I've been working with VR professionally for some 8 years now and creating what I call a "social virtual reality" seemed simple enough, but has turned out to be much more complex than I initially imagined. In the same way that in normal VR a single badly scaled object can break immersion, in "social VR" a single contradiction kills the experience. But when stars align and eveything works, it's magical. I started with whodunnits but have expanded it into linear and non-linear storytelling. At this point the generation pipeline has some 40+ separate steps, the output of ones feeding others, until it all comes down to single prompt the NPC uses to talk using the realtime API. The platform can create a complete narrative (including cast personalities and images) in some 20 minutes, and in the process generates the equivalent to a big book of text. I've been working on this just because I can and I am a bit obsessed with getting it working perfectly, and I don't really know what I'll do with it when it does.
arexxbifs
I played various murder mystery games this summer and one of them had this feature: you could call a suspect and ask arbitrary questions for a limited amount of time (three minutes or something). The problem was of course that the model hallucinated an answer to one of the questions, suggesting that other suspects were related by blood even though they clearly weren't.
anonzzzies
It is a nice idea ; I will try it later. Everyone can poop on AI, that’s fine, but this specifically states it is AI and how it is used, so just click on another HN link to cry about AI, not the ones that actually specifically mention it.
thrance
Meh, it's like the fourth such "interview AI to solve the mystery!" implementation I've seen. It's always so bland, uninspired and boring, and drags on for waaay too long.
panorama
Very neat idea, and overall it is more well-done than I assumed a vibe-coded game would be. Unfortunately I ran out of time and now the game locks me out of doing anything and I don't know who the murderer is :( I wish there was just a way to have it revealed. I've always thought that a game like Civilization should allow the user to interact with different opposing world leaders, but in a non-deterministic way as opposed to a subset of fixed interactions. Given what you know about this leader's temperament, goals, and so on, you can conduct diplomacy in a way that can be way more immersive and crafty than what the game currently gives you, which hasn't seem to evolve much in decades.
smusamashah
Please add a demo video/voice where you show someone asking questions and AI answering it. I wanted to see what it is like but dont want to signup.
MrRowTheBoat
Hi everyone!!! Thanks so much for the support. I launched this at midnight prior to logging off and going to bed, funnily enough a massive storm hit us around 3am and I woke up and noticed my OpenAI account failed to fund lol. So we ran out of funds and it caused things to break for some of you. Just waking up here on the East coast, once my daughter is occupied I will try to answer more of your comments!
october8140
AI: Yea I did it.
qmmmur
Boo. AI Slop. Be critical of what you’re making please.
JoeDaDude
I have an LLM running locally on my machine complete with STT and TTS. While I don't expect much, it will be fun to get my LLM to play the game.