The interview demo

A five-minute scene where you question a woman across a desk and decide whether to clear her. She is not on rails: every answer comes from a language model running on your machine, she hears you through your microphone, and she speaks with a voice synthesised locally.

Play it first, if you would rather see than read: https://merrymaker14.itch.io/the-interview — a free Windows build, about 788 MB, which fetches its language model on the first launch.

Where it lives. The scene is Assets/Demo/Scenes/InterviewDemo.unity in the project repository. It is not packaged into Samples~ yet — the three samples that ship are HelloNpc, LivingCharacter and WorldAware. This page describes it because it is the fullest answer to "what does a finished thing built on this look like".

What it is for

Three questions get asked about a local-model plugin, and a demo is the only honest way to answer any of them:

It is deliberately not a technology showcase with buttons labelled "test perception". It is a small game, because a plugin that only demos well is a plugin nobody finishes shipping with.

The premise

You are a clearance officer on a night shift. Your supervisor, Verey, has left you a candidate and a file about her. Your job is to work through the form, decide whether the file and the woman agree, and sign.

There is a catch, and it is the point: the evidence cannot tell you what she is. She is a human or an android on a coin flip, and the contradictions in her file are seeded independently of that. Clearing an android is not a loss. Detaining a human is not a loss either. There is no score, because a score would turn it into "guess whether it is an AI", which is a worse game and a dishonest one.

What you get at the end is the truth beside your own marks: what she actually was, which of her claims really did disagree with the file, and where your reading matched.

What you do

Ask her things. Type into the box and press Enter, or hold V and speak. Speech is transcribed locally by Whisper and sent as a question the moment it is recognised — no second keystroke, because having said something out loud and then being asked to press a key breaks the one illusion the demo exists to sell.

Three ways to ask, and they cost different amounts:

Composure starts at 70 and is visible in the status line as a band: Settled, Guarded, Cornered. It is not decoration — below 8 she stops cooperating and the interview ends whether you were finished or not. About five hard presses gets there, so pressure is a resource you spend rather than a button you hold.

Repeating a question she has already answered costs 7. Long silences cost 4: she notices.

Mark the form. Eight items, each with the file's version of it. Confirm the ones she backs up, contradict the ones she does not. The first item is already filled in — that is Verey's, and the form says so; override it if you disagree.

Sign. CLEAR or DETAIN, at any point. You have eighteen questions; signing early is allowed and sometimes the right call.

What to watch while you play

The green panel, top right, is the plugin talking about itself:

tier: Standard
model: qwen3-4b-q4km
tok/s: 20.9
to first audio: 2532 ms

• tier — what the hardware probe decided your machine can carry (Hardware tiers)
• model — which model that tier chose from the catalog
• tok/s — generation speed on your GPU, measured, not claimed
• to first audio — from your question to her first spoken syllable

That last number is the one that matters, and it is measured the honest way: not "the model finished" but "sound came out of the speakers". The first turn of a session is slower than the rest — the prompt cache is filling — and Limitations gives the distribution across twenty-one measured turns.

Watch her, too. She breathes, shifts her weight, and turns her head — body first, then eyes — toward things you mention that are actually in the room. The tape recorder is a real point of interest; she looks at it when it comes up, and she does not invent objects that are not there.

What is plugin and what is demo

Worth knowing if you are reading the code to copy from it.

The demo assembly references the plugin and nothing of the game around it. That is the interesting property: it was written against the public API by someone with the source open, which is how several of the documentation pages you are reading got corrected.

Running it

1. Open Assets/Demo/Scenes/InterviewDemo.unity.
2. Press Play. The first start loads the model — several seconds during which the equipment panel is still filling in.
3. Ask her something.

It needs the same three things the rest of the plugin needs: a model in StreamingAssets, Piper with a paired voice, and — for speech input only — a Whisper model. Tools ▸ Offline AI NPC ▸ Check my setup names whichever is missing.

English only, and the settings screen says so rather than pretending. The demo ships one voice, and her persona, the file and the epilogues are written in English. The language row lists all four the plugin has configured and greys out the three this download cannot voice — they need a voice file the demo does not carry. Dialogue and recognition would work in any of them; the pipeline underneath is the same one that speaks Japanese and Spanish (Languages).

Ask her in another language and she declines rather than answering: an English synthesiser handed Russian produces phonetic noise, and a player hearing that concludes the speech is broken rather than the language unsupported.

Desktop only, in this version. The scene switches XR off on purpose and runs on mouse and keyboard. PC VR is planned — the mode detection is one line, but the HUD is a screen-space canvas that does not exist inside a headset, so a VR build needs it in world space with ray-based input first. Standalone Quest is not a target and will not become one: the model is gigabytes and the speech engines are separate desktop processes.

The endings

Four, from what she was crossed with what you signed, and none of them is a verdict on you:

The reason to play it twice is that the other assignment reads completely differently against the same evidence.