Sony patents an AI assistant feature called PlayStation Assist

Many major tech companies have entered the smart home market. Similar to Microsoft's Xbox One getting voice command support for both Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa, Sony seems to be working on something of its own. 

In a new patent, the Japanese company describes its PlayStation Assist to be an AI-powered voice assistant. This could bring about the possibility of players asking their AI questions regarding the game they are playing, like the location of certain items and whatnot. The beauty of AI is that it improves over time, providing better answers to questions asked and it will be very interesting to see how Sony integrates this with the PlayStation. 

Video game industry analyst, Daniel Ahmed stated that PlayStation Assist could have deep integration with games which might even allow things like having the location of items and secrets indicated on ingame maps in answer to player queries. This would eliminate the need to use your phone or any other device while playing. 

The patent describes PlayStation Assist as a method of providing gaming assistance which will allow players "request help through a query to a back-end game assist server". What's more, these queries can be in any format or combination of formats, like audio, video and text. 

If done properly, this could lead to some groundbreaking experiences, but not all patents see the light of day. On the other hand, it could be a planned feature for the PlayStation 5.

This feature won't be for everyone, especially the hardcore gamers that prefer to discover things by themselves, but there are many others that wouldn't mind and this feature clearly has them in mind.