Aiming to improve the gaming experience, Sony has filed a patent for a gaming-focused AI voice assistant, tentatively called PlayStation Assist, which will answer player queries with in-game responses via consoles and smartphones.
Sony filed the patent back in March but only became public in recent days.
Discovered by games industry analyst Daniel Ahmad, the assistant will answer spoken user queries with instant responses, much like how Siri, Alexa or Cortana works.
According to the patent, this in-game assistant would be made possible with the help of a back-end game assist server or a third-party AI working on a deep learning engine.
“The type of information it could help players with involves character and strategy, scheduling co-op gameplay through a cloud service, getting info on friends, as well as information about how to proceed in case you get stuck somewhere in the game,” the patent states.
“For example, when a player gets stuck, the player can request help through a query to a back-end game assist server, which may be of any format, or a combination of formats, including audio, text, video, etc.”
“The game assist server is configured to match the query to modelled responses based on a current game context from which the query was presented.”
Although this is a feature expected to be part of the upcoming PlayStation 5, there is currently no confirmation whether it will be exclusive to games developed for the new console.
