Like many of you, I struggle daily to my gaming and life in balance. But sometimes, it’s a struggle to keep both aspects of life together. Luckily, Ubisoft are creating a new personal gaming assistant called Sam to help “enhance players’ gaming experience.” You message Sam through the Ubisoft Club app, letting you check your friends list, profile information, and more by, uh, talking to a robot.
Who needs Sam when you have us? Check out the best Rainbow Six Siege operators.
Sam also keeps track of how your gaming performance is going, and will even send you community-made tip videos after a particularly bad Rainbow Six Siege match, specially tailoring the results to your problem areas. I’m sure having your skills questioned by a robot will never feel especially condescending or irritating.
Beyond that, you can ask Sam about release dates and easter eggs, how long they’ve been playing a title or what their friends are currently logged into, or whether Ezio or Bayek is the better assassin. At least I’m sure Sam will provide better conversation than your forum of choice.
Sam is built with Google Cloud’s Dialogflow tech, which uses natural language processing for “conversational interfaces.” Ubisoft’s online services VP, Stephanie Perotti, says “With Sam, our ambition is to create an innovative and helpful service for players, one that knows them and helps push them get more out of their gaming experience. Sam provides a more personalized experience for our fans and delivers them what they need faster, so they can spend less time searching and more time playing.”
Sam joins the likes of Cortana and Alexa as corporate-powered AI entities that (almost) assuredly lack the capabilities to join forces and create a Skynet-esque disaster. If you want to be in on the ground floor of a possible robot apocalypse, Sam is now available in Canada as part of the Ubisoft Club app, with more markets to be added in upcoming months. (Personally, I’m holding out hope that this is a new stage of the Outbreak ARG.)