You’re probably more than a little familiar with the likes of Alexa, Siri and Cortana as digital assistants on your smartphone and little loudspeakers perched in the corners of kitchens and living rooms, but Ubisoft are the first gaming company to try and get in on this action (Microsoft aside). Meet Sam:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhyLRYo0HrA
Available from today within the Ubisoft Club app, Sam is on hand to answer questions and try to dynamically interact with your gaming. If you want to catch the latest trailer, it can sort you out, but at the same time, Ubisoft are keeping tabs on your gaming and so they can have Sam let you know how you’re getting on in the game and your percentage completion, what your friends are playing, and even spot that you totally sucked in a particular multiplayer match and suggest a community video to give you a few tips. Of course, if you want to buy a game, then Sam will be more than happy to send you a link to the uPlay store.
It’s probably no surprise that Ubi haven’t built all of this themselves and are actually using Google Cloud Dialogflow to help with the processing of all the data and enable Sam to have natural responses to your voice and text inputs.
Stephanie Perotti, vice president of online services at Ubisoft said, “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. Incorporating Google Cloud’s Dialogflow Enterprise Edition has helped us work dynamically and iterate faster so we can better service our fans.”
The real problem is that it’s all a tiny bit creepy and a tiny bit redundant. For one thing, Sam lives on your phone, so you’ll have to actually turn it on in order to engage with Sam’s more proactive suggestions. Not only that, but you need the Ubisoft Club app, and it would be interesting to know what kind of adoption rates Ubisoft has for that. It’s an interesting experiment at any rate.
Sam is now in beta as part of the app, but currently restricted to Canadian players, with plans to spread to other regions in due course.
Source: press release
Steelhead
That’s exactly what my gaming was missing. Ubisoft keeping tabs on me while I play, because they can absolutely be trusted with my data.
Basketballgaz
The voice reminds mw so much of F.L.U.D.D. from Super Mario Sunshine!