Ramble lets kids (8+) video-chat with an expressive AI tutor companion who responds in real-time with lifelike speech, gestures, and emotions—seamlessly blending friendly conversations with personalized educational games.
Overview
Ramble offers children and teens (ages 8+) an immersive AI companion blending entertainment with educational enrichment. Powered by Unreal Engine 5.5 and OpenAI's Realtime API, users interact with a fully expressive 3D character through a lifelike video call interface.
Unlike existing static AI assistants, Ramble fosters genuine connections through dynamic emotions, contextual gestures, and seamless lip-synchronized speech—leveraging Unreal’s skeletal mesh animation system & mobile rendering features, WebSocket support, and responsive Widget-based UI. This ensures that conversations flow naturally, allowing Ramble to respond with authentic personality and emotional intelligence.
Ramble's core innovation is its contextual awareness, identifying teaching opportunities within conversations and smoothly transitioning into personalized educational games, such as vocabulary quizzes or interactive storytelling. This contextual awareness, coupled with Rambles uniquely real-time visual feedback (lip-sync, expressive animations), leads to a significant enhancement of user immersion and learning engagement.
The current prototype demonstrates core conversational functionalities, real-time animation integration, and foundational UI elements. Planned enhancements include expanded educational content, comprehensive character customization, and robust parental controls. With a targeted launch on Android—and iOS, contingent on funding—Ramble aims to reimagine technology as a meaningful tool for companionship and education.
Vision for Growth
Epic MegaGrant funding will significantly accelerate Ramble’s transition from prototype to a fully polished, widely available and published product, filling a distinct gap in interactive educational AI experiences for youth. In development part-time since November 2024, this funding will allow for my immediate full-time dedication, accelerating the following growth objectives:
Enhance Product Quality and User Experience
Invest in premium software licenses, development hardware, and professional digital assets. This ensures exceptional animation quality, seamless interactions, and polished user experiences—making Ramble a benchmark in interactive education.
Accelerate Development Full-Time
Full-time dedication accelerates Ramble’s release significantly, capturing current enthusiasm for AI-driven experiences. Success means swiftly gaining substantial early market impact, heightened user engagement, and continued growth through frequent updates to Ramble’s features and its underlying LLM.
Broaden Platform Reach and Audience
Acquire critical Apple hardware to enable development for iOS and utilize advanced animation capabilities (e.g., Unreal’s LiveLink plugin). Expanding Ramble to both Android and iOS markets substantially increases potential audience reach, reinforcing commercial viability.
Drive Early User Acquisition and Visibility
Strategically collaborate with marketing specialists for targeted pre-launch and launch campaigns. Professional marketing will significantly boost initial visibility, adoption rates, brand awareness, and early momentum, critical for sustained growth.
MegaGrant funding amplifies Ramble’s development, market entry, and scalability—perfectly aligning with Epic’s mission of sustained innovation and community impact.
Nov - Apr 2025
Pre-production
Functional conversational prototype
Core UI
LLM integration
Placeholder assets
Apr - May 2025
Production begins
Finalize character design
Refine animation system
Jun - Jul 2025
Core Development
Advanced conversational logic
Refined UI/UX
Initiate COPPA (and possibly GDPR-K) compliance
Aug - Sep 2025
Content & Compliance
Integrate educational/interactive content
Finalize COPPA compliance and privacy policy
Oct 2025
Alpha Testing & Optimization
User testing for critical feedback
Mobile optimizations
Nov 2025
Marketing & Pre-launch Prep
Execute strategic marketing campaign
Finalize monetization
Prepare app submission(s)
Dec 2025
Official public launch 🎉
Launch polished MVP on Android/iOS
Gather initial feedback
Refine monetization
Unique Technological Features
High level look at the game loop
Real-time AI Streaming via WebSockets
Ramble uniquely integrates OpenAI's Realtime API directly with Unreal Engine, marking a significant latency improvement over the non-real-time methods Ramble started with (Chat Completions and Whisper APIs). By continuously streaming both user inputs and AI responses through a bidirectional WebSocket connection, Ramble ensures fluid and lifelike conversational experiences.
Dynamic AI-driven Animations & Interactions
Real-time sentiment analysis integrates directly with Unreal’s Animation Blueprints and Meta’s Oculus LipSync plugin, allowing Ramble to exhibit natural facial expressions, precise lip synchronization, and contextual gestures. This creates deeply engaging, realistic conversations.
AI-Powered Educational Games
Ramble seamlessly transitions between natural conversations and personalized educational experiences, recognizing learning opportunities as they arise during user interactions. When the moment is right, it suggests relevant, customized educational games and activities. For example, Ramble will dynamically generate quizzes or jokes based on topics the child has recently discussed. A word guessing game might incorporate vocabulary from a previous conversation, reinforcing new concepts through fun, personalized gameplay.
This approach creates an organic learning environment where educational content flows naturally from conversation—never feeling forced or disconnected. The result is a smart, responsive companion that not only answers questions but actively supports and enhances learning through meaningful, interactive experiences rooted in the child’s own curiosity.
Innovative UI/UX
The intersection of conversational AI and human interaction represents largely uncharted territory, especially for younger users. Ramble embraces this as an opportunity to pioneer intuitive interfaces specifically designed for AI companionship.
A key innovation addresses one of the most common frustrations in voice-based AI interactions: premature interruptions. Ramble solves this through a novel visual indicator using Unreal widgets and materials. Speech submission progress is displayed as an animated curtain rising up the screen. When the curtain reaches the top, Ramble understands it's time to respond. Children maintain complete control through simple gestures – they can accelerate the curtain to get a faster response, pause it during thinking moments, or cancel it entirely to continue speaking.
The result is an interaction that feels natural, comfortable, and engaging, significantly improving the overall user experience.
Community Support
Sharing Knowledge with the Unreal Engine Community
Integrating Large Language Models with Unreal Engine represents an emerging field with limited documentation. I will contribute practical resources through detailed tutorials and technical write-ups on the official Unreal Engine forums, r/unrealengine subreddit, and the Unreal Source Discord channel. These resources will include implementation approaches, troubleshooting guides, and optimization techniques specifically focused on real-time AI interaction, WebSocket integration, and animation systems for conversational characters. Beyond posting content, I will actively engage with the community by answering questions and providing guidance across all three platforms to developers exploring similar integrations.
Practical Technical Contributions
During development for Android, I encountered significant limitations with Unreal Engine's built-in virtual keyboard. I've published a comprehensive and practical write-up here detailing my workaround solution, enabling other mobile developers to overcome this common challenge. I plan to continue sharing tutorials for other interesting challenges and solutions I encounter in the future.
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Additionally, Meta recently introduced their "Audio to Expression" plugin—a successor to their OVRLipSync plugin—with advanced lip-sync capabilities and expressive facial animations. As it is currently unavailable for Unreal Engine, I plan to manually adapt and integrate it from the Unity release. Upon successful integration, I will openly share the solution and implementation details with the broader Unreal Engine community, providing significant value and practical help to other developers.
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By documenting how Unreal Engine can power innovative AI-driven interactive experiences, Ramble will help establish practical implementation patterns for conversational character applications. The project demonstrates Unreal's capabilities in new and expanding use cases, showcasing how the engine's superior animation systems and visual fidelity create more engaging and responsive interactions. These contributions support Epic's vision for Unreal Engine as a versatile platform while providing a valuable reference for developers exploring emerging AI applications with Unreal.
Budget And Funding Justification
Currently, Ramble's development is personally funded and I am flexible within Epic’s MegaGrant range ($50,000-$100,000). The full $100,000 funding would greatly enhance Ramble’s quality, speed, and market-readiness:
Developer Salary & Expenses: $50,000
Full-time dedicated development, animation, design, and project management.
Hardware, Equipment & Software Licensing: $25,000
Apple workstation for iOS, Rokoko motion capture, Reallusion animation software, Substance 3D, and essential testing devices.
Legal Compliance & Educational consulting: $7,500
Professional guidance ensuring COPPA/GDPR-K compliance and educational effectiveness.
Marketing, Freelance & Business Setup: $10,000
This budget will cover targeted freelance marketing support, creation of promotional materials, professional website development and hosting, and the establishment of an LLC for structured and secure business operations.
LLM Usage & Initial Launch Buffer: $5,000
Manage costs of initial user interactions, ensuring smooth monetization transition.
Contingency Fund: $2,500
Reserved for unexpected opportunities and expenses.
Monetization Strategy
To ensure Ramble's long-term sustainability while managing the ongoing costs of AI processing, I am evaluating the following balanced revenue approaches:
Subscription-Based Freemium Model
Ramble could launch with a freemium approach, offering users a set number of free interactions to showcase the app’s capabilities. This model will transition into a subscription plan to sustainably cover ongoing costs associated with using advanced language models.
In-App Purchases
Users will have the option to buy character accessories and customization items, enhancing engagement through personalization. These cosmetic options will allow children to customize their experience without affecting core functionality, creating an optional revenue stream that doesn't gate essential features.
Customizable AI Instructions
Parents can pay to unlock enhanced customization options for the character's traits, such as its name, interests, and personality nuances. This feature provides additional personalization while maintaining the educational integrity of the core experience.
Challenges and Solutions
Cost Management
Real-time AI conversations require substantial computational resources. Ramble addresses cost concerns through strategic optimizations, including selective use of pre-scripted interactions for common scenarios, efficient caching of animations and assets, and tiered subscription models. Additionally, Ramble's flexible architecture allows easy integration of more efficient AI models as technology advances, ensuring ongoing cost-effectiveness and scalability.
Trust & Safety
Child safety remains paramount. Ramble employs advanced content filtering, comprehensive parental controls, and prioritizes local/on-device processing when possible to minimize data exposure. Clear parental oversight tools include detailed usage analytics and optional conversation monitoring. The app strictly adheres to COPPA standards, and if awarded funding, GDPR-K compliance and a European launch will also be pursued. Robust automated and human moderation strategies ensure consistent content safety and suitability.
Latency Optimization
Fluid conversational interactions are essential for user immersion. Ramble's innovative WebSocket implementation streams user input and AI responses simultaneously, significantly reducing latency. Sophisticated predictive animation systems initiate expressions proactively, even before full responses arrive. Low-bandwidth fallback modes ensure consistent performance, and modular backend design supports regional server distribution to minimize geographic latency, providing seamless user experiences across diverse network conditions.
About Me
I’m a solo developer with over 10 years of professional experience in 3D art, technical art, and interactive media. Passionate about meaningful digital experiences, I’m deeply committed to delivering Ramble—motivated by family members and young users who inspired this project.
View my work and experience here:
Thank you sincerely for considering Ramble for an Epic MegaGrant. Your support will meaningfully accelerate Ramble’s journey, significantly boosting its positive impact on young users worldwide.
Ramble