Ubisoft tests voice controlled AI squadmates in Teammates prototype
Is this the future of gaming, or something that can easily spoil the fun?
Generative AI entering games feels overdue, at least for NPCs. Open world titles already ship with hundreds of scripted side quests, yet most NPCs still repeat the same lines and follow fixed combat patterns. Ubisoft’s new Teammates research project explores what happens when a small model handles more of that behavior on the fly, with players steering their squad through voice rather than menu wheels or canned command lists.
Teammates is a short first person shooter built by the team behind last year’s Neo NPC demo. And no, you can’t download and test it yet. In that demo you play as a resistance fighter infiltrating an enemy base to find five missing teammates and recover their last recorded memories. The whole level is a controlled testbed: a linear mission with combat encounters and simple objectives where Ubisoft can observe how people actually use voice in the middle of a firefight, not just in a quiet dialogue scene.
Source: Ubisoft
At the center of the experiment is Jaspar , an AI assistant that sits inside the fiction and the UI at the same time. Players can ask him to highlight enemies or objects, recap mission goals, explain parts of the lore, adjust HUD elements, tweak visual settings, or pause the game, all through natural speech. Under the hood, Jaspar reads the current game state and surrounding context, then maps what you said to concrete actions, so the system does not rely on rigid key phrases. I mean, this sounds a lot like NVIDIA ACE powered PUBG Ally .
Source: Ubisoft
Your two AI squadmates take cover, focus fire, help with small puzzles, and react to unscripted orders like “take the plate on the left” rather than pre-baked radial menu calls. Ubisoft still uses classic behavior trees for what they are allowed to do, then adds a language model layer that decides how and when to execute those behaviors based on player input and the situation. The company also built an internal API with safety guardrails that filter out hallucinations, toxic lines, or lore-breaking responses before anything reaches the player.
I think the most important detail is that writers still define the story, world rules, and personality sheets, then set “fences” that NPCs cannot cross so improvisation stays on-message rather than turning into random chatter. But if there’s something that is as old as gaming itself, it’s cheating. Gamers will find a way to break these system, in fact, I’m sure some will devote their entire gameplay to that.
Source: Ubisoft
