HOLD THE LINE

Interactive AI Detective Hörspiel

"You shouldn't have called me, detective. But now that you did… the truth has no choice but to answer."

Georg Luif & Stefan Maier 2025

Hold The Line is an interactive AI-driven detective Hörspiel that reimagines the murder mystery for a post-authorship era. At its center is a repurposed 1940s rotary telephone, modified with a Raspberry Pi Pico and transformed into a game controller.

Through this tactile interface, players investigate mysteries by dialing and conversing with a network of AI-generated characters—each a voice-cloned agent with unique narrative traits, emotional profiles, and shifting loyalties.

Rather than following a fixed script, the core narrative logic is structured through high-level prompts; all dialogue and branching paths are generated in real time. The story adapts dynamically to the player's decisions, revealing not only the mystery at hand but also the latent systems that shape it.

Each AI character possesses modifiable stats and procedural behaviors, responding to conversational tone, information exchange, and inter-agent relationships. The project experiments with a shift from traditional narration toward a system of distributed direction—where storytelling becomes emergent from networks of interaction rather than authored in advance.

Multi-Agent Architecture

Voice Cloning

AI-generated characters with distinct vocal personalities and emotional ranges

Real-time Generation

Dynamic dialogue and narrative branching through GPT integration

Rotary Interface

1940s telephone modified with Raspberry Pi Pico for tactile interaction

As both a game and an acoustic theatre piece, Call Me Maybe? blends noir aesthetics, retro technology, and AI dramaturgy to explore themes of control, authorship, and machine subjectivity.

The player listens, directs, and uncovers, but never fully controls the story—experiencing detective work through distributed intelligence rather than singular narrative authority.