Ramble lets kids (8+) video-chat with an expressive AI friend who responds in real-time with lifelike speech, gestures, and emotions—seamlessly blending friendly conversations with personalized educational games.
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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 an expressive 3D character through a lifelike video call interface.
Unlike static AI assistants, Ramble fosters genuine connections through dynamic emotions, contextually appropriate gestures, and seamless lip-synchronized speech. This creates natural conversations where Ramble responds not just with information, but with personality and emotional intelligence.
Ramble's core innovation is its contextual awareness, recognizing teaching opportunities within conversations. It smoothly transitions into educational games tailored to the child's interests and knowledge level, such as word games, personalized quizzes, and storytelling adventures.
The current prototype demonstrates conversational capabilities, speech recognition, animation, and UI elements. Planned enhancements include a suite of educational games, comprehensive character customization, and robust parental controls—allowing parents to tailor Ramble's characteristics and monitor usage while ensuring child safety.
With planned launches on Android and (with funding) iOS, Ramble reimagines technology as a tool for companionship and meaningful learning.
Vision for Growth
Epic MegaGrant funding would significantly accelerate Ramble’s transition from prototype to a fully polished, published product, greatly amplifying its potential for sustained growth. I have been working part-time on Ramble since November 2024, aiming for an eventual Google Play Store release. This grant would immediately enable a full-time commitment, directly enhancing key growth objectives:
Enhance Product Quality and User Experience
Invest in premium software licenses, development hardware, debugging tools, and professional digital assets. This ensures a polished, engaging experience, exceptional animation quality, seamless interactions, and minimal technical issues—positioning Ramble competitively.
Accelerate Development through Full-Time Commitment
This funding allows an immediate full-time transition, substantially accelerating Ramble’s release. Rapid deployment will maximize early market impact, user engagement, and ongoing success in the thriving AI-driven application space.
Broaden Platform Reach and Audience
Acquire Apple hardware for optimized iOS development and enhanced animation (Unreal’s LiveLink). Expanding from Android to iOS significantly broadens the potential user base, enhancing market penetration and 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 enhancement over non-realtime methods (e.g., Chat Completions and Whisper APIs). By continuously streaming both user inputs and AI responses through a bidirectional WebSocket connection, Ramble dramatically reduces latency, ensuring fluid and lifelike conversational experiences. This real-time streaming enables dynamic interaction, generating data that drives responsive animations and nuanced interactions, greatly enhancing user immersion.
Dynamic AI-driven Animations & Interactions
Ramble continuously extracts emotional context and conversation topics from interactions. Real-time sentiment analysis generates specific emotional and gesture signals, directly integrated into Unreal Engine's animation systems. This ensures Ramble’s character exhibits authentic facial expressions, lip synchronization through Oculus LipSync, and context-appropriate gestures—all dynamically aligned with conversation content, creating a deeply engaging, natural interaction.
AI-Powered Educational Games
Seamlessly transitioning between conversational interactions and personalized educational experiences, Ramble recognizes learning opportunities during user dialogues. When appropriate, the system suggests relevant, personalized educational games and activities. For instance, Ramble can dynamically create quizzes or word games tailored specifically around topics recently discussed by the child. For example, a word guessing game might feature vocabulary related to recent discussion topics, reinforcing learning through personalized gameplay. These games intelligently adapt to a child's demonstrated interests and knowledge level, promoting personalized and contextual learning in a naturally engaging way.
This approach creates an organic learning environment where educational content emerges naturally from conversation rather than feeling forced or disconnected. The result is a companion that not only responds to direct questions but actively enriches learning through personalized, engaging activities that build upon the child's unique interests and previous interactions.
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 that displays speech submission progress 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'll 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'll 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 intend to publish a comprehensive and practical write-up detailing my workaround solution, enabling other mobile developers to overcome this common challenge.
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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’s 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 valuable reference for developers exploring emerging application categories beyond traditional gaming.
Budget And Funding Justification
I'm currently personally funding Ramble's development and can be flexible within the MegaGrant request range. Securing the full Epic MegaGrant of $100,000 would significantly elevate 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