Microsoft's Copilot generative AI chatbot is coming to Xbox as an AI assistant tool. The tool is coming soon in beta form for Xbox Insiders on mobile, but a series of proof of concept demonstrations suggests that Xbox intends to integrate Copilot on console and PC to give you tips, reminders of what you were doing last time you played, and recommendations on new games. To quote the Xbox Wire announcement on all this, it "aims to save you time, [and] help you get good."
This gaming Copilot is going out in beta first because Microsoft wants to be sure to get it right, according to corporate VP of gaming AI Fatima Kardar. "We really don't want to mess up the gaming experience," Kardar says in a new episode of the Xbox podcast. "So we have to be very cautious about it, which means we put things out there. We let people give us feedback, try it out, see what resonates, and build from that. I feel that's going to be very important. It does make us uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable. I keep getting reminded that people expect a lot from the Xbox brand and that is what keeps me up at night."
That podcast also shows a few video examples of what a gaming Copilot might be able to do, and while Xbox has slapped "proof of concept only" warnings all over these clips, noting that they're all very much work-in-progress ideas, they do offer some insight into what this all might look like in practice.
In one instance, we see a player returning to Age of Empires 4 after some time away by asking Copilot to reinstall the game from the Xbox app. Once in-game, the AI reminds the player what happened last time they were playing: they "ventured out to take the fight to the Franks, but... let's just say it didn't go as planned." Asked how best to take on a special siege tower, the AI then offers to pull up "a quick strategy guide."
In another example, an Overwatch 2 player is about to start a match when he finds somebody else has already chosen his main, Echo. "Echo's taken," the AI says, "but Cassidy would be a solid pick with this team his mid-range hit scan, and Mercy's damage boost will work great on Elio's ruins. Plus you've done great with him on this map before."
A bit later, the Overwatch 2 map picks up with this player having deployed Cassidy's ult only to get gunned down pretty quickly afterward. "You stayed in the fight too long after your teammates were down," the AI explains. "Great picks with your ultimate, but diving straight into Ramattra was a death sentence."
Then there's a Minecraft example, where the AI guides a player new to the game to those crucial first steps: punching trees, getting to the crafting menu, and figuring out the patterns to build basic tools. Later on, the AI refuses to give an answer because the player doesn't have cheats enabled – so he goes into the menu, turns them on, and asks where to find ore. The AI then points him to a coal deposit he wandered past earlier in the sessions.
All this is designed to be unobtrusive, Kardar explains, so if you never want to see Copilot in-game you don't have to. If this all actually works beyond the proof of concept, seeing the AI directly respond to in-game activity and offer dynamic advice on the fly is genuinely pretty impressive, but there is, of course, the question of how all this info is going to be sourced. You could certainly see a situation where the AI might hit a guide like, say, our explainer on how to get the Monster Hunter Wilds Sharp Fang for armor crafting and either pull out the wrong information, plagiarize it without citing the source, or both.
"We have to really go back to the source," Kardar explains. "There's plenty of information on the Internet about games, [but] not all of that is accurate – or it was accurate and goes out of date. So for us It's very important that we have to partner with game studios as well as other content creators, when you think of guides. Not only do we want to help bring their right information to players, we want to partner with them and make sure that [if] they've put in the work, they should be able to benefit from that as well. So we're also looking at what it means to refer back to the content creators."
It's a bit distressing that the details of how the original guide material might be sourced are still so vague even as it's about to hit beta and get into players' hands. But that's always been the grand criticism of generative AI, and so far AI makers have only paid lip service to those concerns. Either way, it seems we'll be finding out what AI can do for gaming sooner rather than later.
