Microsoft's Copilot AI is coming to Minecraft, will access your inventory and act as a guide

Microsoft will integrate Copilot AI into Xbox and PC games like Minecraft. The company showcased how it will work with the latter at its big Surface and AI event earlier today, and the results are pretty wild. In a demonstration, Microsoft showed how Copilot can act as a digital assistant that you can verbally interact with to provide in-game information, help, and tips.

In Minecraft, it could be as simple as asking for a crafting recipe. Copilot can then step you through the process and even assess your inventory to provide answers on what you might need and where to find it. The whole presentation included a scenario where Copilot acted as an interactive guide for a player looking to craft a sword. It's filled with rich, naturalistic conversational delivery and is impressive, to say the least - watch a short clip of it above.

It's reminiscent of some AI tutors and educational tools that OpenAI has demonstrated - except this time, it's for gaming. This feature will undoubtedly make its way to Xbox consoles and hardware, but as it will require NPU hardware to run, it probably won't arrive for televisions until Microsoft launches its next-gen Xbox console.

Unless, of course, Microsoft offers a cloud-based solution for Xbox gamers. Microsoft's new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop devices are part of the latest Snapdragon X Copilot+ AI PC lineup, so the Minecraft demonstration is presumably running locally on the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU with 45 TOPS of AI performance.

Microsoft is placing a big emphasis on privacy and ensuring that its Copilot tools run locally. Microsoft is said to roll out this new feature in Minecraft first, with other games to follow. Will it spell the end of game guides, looking up YouTube clips to find secrets, or how to take out a challenging boss? For some games, yes. For others, AI could take over and play difficult sections to get you to the next level.

How gamers choose to embrace AI assistants and other tools remains to be seen.

• Read more: Microsoft intros Copilot+ PCs for 'AI PC' era: Copilot+ AI PCs need 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, NPU
• Read more: Microsoft's new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop are Arm-based AI-ready Copilot+ PCs
• Read more: Xbox has a three-pronged strategy for gaming AI
• Read more: Microsoft's Copilot AI will run locally on AI PCs that have at least 40 TOPS of NPU performance