Xbox Is Experimenting With An AI Clippy For Gaming To Help Players Out
Members of the Xbox Insiders program will soon have access to Copilot for Gaming on mobile, a tool aimed at streamlining the process of playing games and minimizing the moments that people spend confused by their hardware or the games that run on it. It's an interesting idea that currently seems like more trouble than it's worth.
Microsoft announced Copilot in-game assistance over on the Xbox Wire blog on Thursday and briefly showed how it will work in the latest episode of the Official Xbox Podcast. The examples included an AI voice telling a player who to pick in Overwatch 2 and a chatbot explaining how to craft wood planks in Minecraft. The program also offered feedback on past in-game failures in Age of Empires and could be used to pull up strategy guides if the player remained stuck.
Perhaps the silliest use case presented in the podcast was telling the Copilot AI to install a game which, if communicating with Copilot via text at least, would seemingly require several more taps and clicks than just doing that manually (a process that already takes only seconds on mobile). The YouTube page is full of people asking why AI needs to be part of the experience at all.
Fortunately, Microsoft has gone to great lengths to make clear that the feature is completely optional and can be turned off entirely. 'It's not just about AI showing up to help you, it's about AI showing up at the right moment,' Microsoft gaming AI VP Fatima Kardar said during the podcast. 'We really have to think about the experience we've built, it cannot be intrusive.'
I can actually see a lot of potential use cases for an Xbox AI agent but it would have to go well beyond the demoed version, which looks more like an iteration of Clippy from Microsoft Word giving obvious and unhelpful advice rather than actually doing stuff for me. Instead of telling me how to do a thing in a game, maybe it could just do it for me, like a more experienced friend would if they were playing with me. Maybe the Copilot can show my kid how to grow food to keep his workers from starving during the winter in Overthrown instead of him asking me every five minutes.
The use cases quickly snowball from there, however, and probably not in a direction Microsoft wants. Why stop at helping me control my console more easily or bypass a frustrating part of a game? Why not have the Xbox Copilot do my dailies for me and grind random encounters in my favorite JRPG while I scroll TikTok? Let the AI grind the battle pass and pop achievements. One reason not to do that might be that I don't want Copilot spying on me and my family. Or, if it eventually becomes a paid service like it will presumably have to be in order to be financially sustainable, even the cheevos it could earn for me wouldn't be worth it.
We'll see how useful, frightening, or silly the tool ends up being once it's out. In the meantime, Microsoft also revealed that over 1,000 games like Balatro are now Play Anywhere between Xbox and PC, and the number is expected to keep rising. The program is reportedly part of a larger initiative to make the Xbox experience seamless across multiple devices, something that sounds much more useful than AI linking me to Minecraft recipes.
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