Your Xbox Is Getting a Copilot

Copilot is, by now, present in basically every Microsoft product or software out there. Your Windows OS, your browser, your Microsoft 365 suite, and everything in between. So when Microsoft announced it would be adding Copilot to Xbox, it didn’t come across as much of a surprise.

Microsoft has announced that it will be rolling out “Copilot for Gaming,” a fresh new take on Copilot that’s meant to help you out in games. As per Fatima Kardar, Vice President of Gaming AI at Xbox, “gaming is the only form of entertainment where you can get stuck,” further adding that “that’s where you want something to show up to say, ‘let’s help you get past that.'”

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So how does Copilot work on your Xbox, exactly? It’s meant to be a “companion” of sorts that does a little bit of everything. Copilot will, for one, offer advice and guidance to help players improve their in-game performance—if you’re stuck somewhere in a game and you can’t get past a final boss or a puzzle, Copilot will help you by telling you what you should do to get past that.

Most people have referenced guides for decades to get assistance with getting past games, so this is just a way of pulling up those steps more quickly and right from your game. It probably references community-written walkthroughs, online guides, or other forum posts to give users info on what to do to get past a specific part—the AI model might have knowledge itself on how to do some extremely basic stuff, such as Minecraft crafting recipes, but it might have a hard time with newer games released after the model’s knowledge cutoff date. It will, at one point or another, have to search Bing for more information.

At least from the prototypes shown by Microsoft, which might or might not resemble the final product, it doesn’t look like the sources are being referenced on-screen if that’s the case, which is not ideal. A lot of the time, guides receive contributions from regular people who get little to no payment for their work and get no benefit from writing them other than community recognition. Copilot tends to be really good at listing out sources whenever it does reference one, given it was first launched as an AI component to the Bing search engine. So we’re hoping that we’re wrong here.

This is not the only thing the AI does. Copilot will also suggest games tailored to individual player preferences, and it will also help to streamline the process of finding, downloading, and updating games. Gamers will decide how and when to engage with Copilot, ensuring the AI enhances, rather than intrudes upon, the gaming experience. Kardar stressed, “It’s not just about AI showing up to help you, it’s about AI showing up at the right moment… it cannot be intrusive.”

It’s a weird thing to add AI on, and some people might still prefer to just keep it dormant and look up guides online. It will also probably take some time before we see a finalized version of this arrive on Xbox consoles or PC games. Microsoft says that, for now, it’s just starting with a mobile preview for Xbox Insiders, but we might see more down the road.

Source: Microsoft