Ubisoft made a prototype game with voice-controlled AI teammates (www.engadget.com)

Ubisoft revealed Teammates, an experimental playable prototype that lets players issue natural-language, voice commands to AI teammates that combine language understanding with visual awareness. The closed playtest with a few hundred players casts you as a resistance fighter directing three AI NPCs—Jaspar (a lore-aware assistant that can onboard players and tweak settings), and Pablo and Sofia (in-world robotic companions). Footage shows the agents grounding commands in the player’s view — telling Sofia to “stand behind a barrel” produces context-aware positioning — and Ubisoft is testing selectable personality sets (e.g., “Bad Cat and Good Boy”) to vary expression and behavior. For the AI/ML community this is a noteworthy, practical step toward multimodal, real-time game agents and pipelines for integrating them into production engines. Teammates builds on Ubisoft’s Neo NPC demos with Nvidia and packages middleware that already works with the Snowdrop and Anvil engines, signaling a path for reuse across titles. The project highlights applied research challenges: real-time multimodal understanding, response latency, behavior tuning (players flagged agents as verbose), safety/personality controls, and the UX of persistent, adaptive agents. Ubisoft’s prior tools like Ghostwriter and the company’s admission around AI-generated assets underscore both the creative potential and governance needs as generative, grounded agents move closer to mainstream games.