Apparently Facebook have developed an AI assistant for Minecraft which users can control from various typed commands.
This AI assistant takes the form of an avatar within the Minecraft world and allows the player to communicate directly with it. So for example the avatar could be asked to build a circular structure out of blocks and then answer questions about what’s it doing, prompted by the player.
The AI design team’s goal was to usefully interpret typed commands from potentially unclear or badly constructed directives and to learn from any mistakes it made.
This could set the stage for later generations of avatar assistants where the commands are spoken and not typed.